The Other Day

I was thinking about Moon Tower the other day, how we used to climb up at night and sit at the top, feet dangling over everything, me searching the streets below for things I knew and you looking for things you didn't.

I never knew why you called it that. I never asked, never even looked it up until the other day, ten years later. Apparently moon towers were built back in the day to light up towns at night. But that still doesn't explain it, seeing as our Moon Tower was an abandoned grain elevator that stood rusting in the middle of our little town.

I still remember the night we found that broken lock, how we looked at each other and smiled, knowing what the other was thinking without saying a word. We didn't hesitate, didn't worry about getting caught, getting hurt. Even as those metal stairs creaked and moaned their warnings, we kept circling that tower in the dark, story after story, higher and higher.

I thought we'd never make it to the top. When we eventually did, I remember dropping an empty beer bottle over the edge and being surprised at how quickly it shattered on the ground below.

________

I have a son now. His name's Alex, and he'll start kindergarten in August. We visited school the other day and met his teacher. Not much had changed, and I couldn't help but wonder if he'd meet someone there like you or me, if the two of them would hide behind that same oak tree at recess, together, away from the others, if they too would find small rocks lying among its roots and pretend they were cars, racing them along the grooves in the bark, crossing, merging, and separating again.

Alex loves baseball even more than we did. I gave him a plastic bat and ball when he turned four, and he carried it with him wherever he went that year. Some nights, Emma and I would be sitting on the couch, watching the Cards game, and Alex would walk in front of the screen with his bat and we'd forget about the game entirely, end up just watching him, cheering as he pretended to hit, to run the bases, to slide safely into home.

It made me think of those summer days in your backyard. I was McGwire, you were Griffey. We posed for the cameras, flipped our bats. We imagined the announcers gripping their desks, voices rising in disbelief as the ball sailed in slow motion over the centerfield wall. We trotted slowly around the bases, savoring our triumphs as the crowd went absolutely wild. In living rooms around the country, people stood and cheered. Husbands, wives, kids held hands, jumped up and down, screamed in joy at what we had done.

Alex started tee ball this year, and I was watching him play the other day when my mind started drifting to our summers playing Little League together, you pitching, me catching. Before long I started seeing you, or a version of you, sitting next to my boy in the dugout. They were laughing, spitting sunflower seeds at each other while you and I, older now, sat in the stands with our wives, sipping beer, laughing, savoring our triumphs, screaming in joy at what we had done, whispering to each other about the strangeness of time and how it seems to bend, to loop back on itself, allowing us to relive the most beautiful moments of our lives again and again and again.

________

When my mom finally died, you told me if you had a brother, you'd want him to be just like me. I never told you how much that meant to me, that it felt like the pouring of a foundation where one had just crumbled. I never told you that I rose the next morning and knew where to step for the first time since it happened. I never told you that. I never told you anything like that.

My dad's still here, more or less. He...