Mod 12

Twenty years ago I am playing in my best friend's basement. Probably my first best friend. I can almost make out what we're playing - like a word on the tip of my tongue I can almost verbalize - but I know if I attempt to look straight at it, the memory will dodge and weave. Evade.

So I can't make it out before the phone rings.

Mom wants me home for supper in ten minutes.

I tell Jeff, "My mom wants me home for supper in ten minutes." And I start to leave. I live down the block. About a minute away if I walk at a moderate pace on my six-year-old legs. When I was six I ran a mile in 6 minutes and 52 seconds during the memorial day fun run. I can't run a mile at all right now. I could jog it. Slowly.

You said ten minutes.

I know but I'm going to go.

Ten minutes is a long time.

I go up the steps and out the front door before Jeff can stop me and run down the block. I sprint like I am running away from something. Running away from Jeff like he is chasing me with something. Twenty seconds later I am home.

For one of the shows I am working on, the sound designer (a company member) wants me to conduct a series of interviews with actors, designers, the director, etc. The play is about a girl reliving the final days of her childhood before her mother abandons her. During these interviews I could ask: "What do you think about this play?" "How do you relate to your character?" Blah blah blah. But what would that accomplish? So what I am going to ask them is this: "When do you think your childhood started to end?"

I am 3 years, 11 months, and 23.5 days old and I am on the playground of my preschool and a teacher (babysitter?) is telling me I have a phone call and then my dad is telling me I have a sister. I am in kindergarten and I propose to Alexis right before naptime; Sam A. teaches me how to draw a horse (he would die of some pre-existing condition when we are all in seventh grade during a sleepover; I would learn about this from Lauren - a blonde i had a crush on in second grade - at lunch while Liz is sucking on a bouillon cube and I'll shrug it off and say I didn't really know the guy so why would I go to his funeral; when I am taking classes at the art school during undergrad I will run into Sam's mom on a regular basis. Her smile's still sad.). It's first grade and I pee on John for making fun of me in the bathroom; I don't understand why I have to sit out in the hall, why I always have to sit out in the hall. Second grade: have a crush on a blonde who doesn't choose me as a square dance partner; she chooses a guy with the last name Valentine (who would later apparently do some weird f-ed up shit); I have to play Little Bear in a fucked up rendition of Goldilocks and I swear I will have nothing to do with the theatre ever again...in seventh grade I am Will Parker in Oklahoma! and Liz is coaching me on how to sing in front of people: "If you can't sing in front of me," she tells me in my living room, "how are you going to sing in front of a whole audience."

The memories unfold like a personalized yearbook. Does our childhood end with every memory we carry into our adulthood? Does it end as we accumulate the ghosts that will haunt us for the rest of our life? Ghosts that always seem to resurface at the end of the year when we are taking stock. Looking back.

New Year's Eve is my favorite holiday because of its inevitability. Nothing drives it but time itself. A year ends. And you wake up the next morning and all your calendars are invalid (burn them!). And whatever you were is now optional. A suggestion. I am going to quit smoking. I am going to stop eating poorly. I am going to make more of an effort at maintaining my relationships with people other than Rachel (yeah that was mine for 2007)...I am going to stop masturbating in the middle of Walgreens...you saw the news right?...oh you didn't...oh well then this is kind of awkward...

The resolutions aren't inevitable and are, in fact, completely arbitrary. You could decide to change your ways any day of the year just like you don't have to wait until Lent to give up chocolate. But the holiday is inevitable. The temporal renewal is inevitable. And maybe that's what encourages us.

It's January again. Mod 12. Right math guys? 313 mod 12 is 1 right? And we all want to go back to 1 again. Pass go again. Collect $200 again.

Jeff moved away about a year and ten minutes after we were playing in his basement, and I never saw/spoke to him again. I often wonder...no that's a lie...on New Year's Eve I wonder what we could have done in those ten minutes. I wonder if our friendship would have solidified enough that when he moved we would have stayed in touch...okay, I don't wonder that...retroactive nostalgic editing.

But I am wondering it now...

Resolution 2008: Don't sprint home.