#57: "rockets in the front yard"

Just took the dog out for a later-than-normal evening walk. On our way back into the house I noticed yet again how our front yard seems to be a magnet for street refuse. I don't understand how/why everything seems to blow in our yard, but I sweep up so much garbage out there it's disturbing.

But as I turned the key in the gate to our vestibule I noticed something that really wasn't trash. It's been discarded and forgotten, but not with intent. It just didn't have the glue to hold on anymore, and thus the sticker that Fred surely put somewhere on his person found its way to the cold concrete outside our home. 

Fred loves his stickers. He doesn't know what they are, has no idea what the cartoonish drawings on them represent (they're rockets), and doesn't realize that they are one time use items. He loves them anyway. He sticks them to himself, to his clothing, on his hat, on his books, to each other. He grabs on to the fleeting joy in their less than sticky lives and lives only in that moment. Honestly, I envy that.

I'm not necessarily the kind of person that will hang on to a metaphorical sheet of stickers and never use them because they they'd be gone and done and that would be sad. I'm the kind of person that buys the sheet with purpose and then ends up with surplus that I'll never use, give away, or toss out. I think that I'll find a spot for the stickers that will again be perfect later on, instead of just taking the enjoyment straightaway. 

As a sidenote, I really do have a very large sheet of Tottenham stickers that I bought to put one sticker on my bike helmet, so if anyone wants one I have plenty to give away.

I think a large part of what keeps me from adhering these stickers is the inherent stickiness of things. Maybe I'm worried that what I place them on they won't stick to, and then they'll find the same fate as the rocket. Maybe it's that they'll stick too well and I'll place them just ever so slightly askew and will rue the day I peeled them off the sheet. Maybe it's still just a metaphor.

Some of my wife's best friends are people she went to high school with. They have stuck in her life now for twenty plus years, and while they don't see each other super often they do connect once every six weeks or so. I, on the other hand, haven't seen anyone I went to high school with since my tenth year reunion. My undergrad friends have lost their adhesion with about the same effect, save for one or two. I'm most sad about my closest friends from grad school, as I believed they'd be the basis of a network that I could call on for years to come. I'm lucky if I can get them to respond to an email these days, and though I've invited them all, none has darkened my doorway. It seems time and distance really have taken their toll.

I am at a point where I need people like that, and they aren't there. They've become rockets in the front yard.