Here's a little thing that I wrote a month or so ago. Part of it is true, part of it isn't. It's a work in process, obviously, and this is only the first part of what should be a longer story. If you like it please let me know. If you don't and know a way for me to improve, let me know that, too.
When I ran into George it didn’t seem like a life-changing moment. We were just kids at daycare, waiting for our parents to come and running in circles. The building had a playground with swings but kids don’t need that. Give them an island with some bushes in the middle of a parking lot and they’ve got hours of entertainment. Everybody knew that you were supposed to run clockwise around the shrub island, it was a law that nobody spoke but everybody felt. I don’t know if George went the wrong way on purpose or if his inner compass was off kilter and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we were running in one direction, our band of pirates or Vikings or marines or whatever we were that day, and he was running in the other.
It happened at night, though it wasn’t stormy, and that accounts for our poor vision. I rounded a corner, running away from my friends or towards them, depending on how you look at it. That’s the beauty of childhood games. There doesn’t need to be a reason for anything. Run this way because it is fun, run that way because it’s fun, too. Be a dinosaur, be a superhero, be a gust of wind, be a kid. One lap you’re flying in a spaceship, the next you’re driving a racecar. You can’t be wrong when you’re in third grade and running in a circle. Accidents, however, do happen. They usually end up with a bruised knee or a scraped hand. This time I became a supervillain.
