One Single Perfect Moment
One of the best times in my life was the morning after my friends Ben and Brandin and I had one of our epic sleepovers during senior year in high school. How their super-Mormon parents let this happen (multiple times) and how they let us in the house with The Crying Game and Total Eclipse and Kids is beyond me, but thank their blue-eyed Jesus they let us have the kind of friendship we all needed desperately at that time, whether we knew it yet or not.
On this particular morning, we had to be up at 4 a.m. to fold and deliver newspapers on Br's route, and by the time we got home, shoes wet with dew, we were set on having waffles, even though we weren't quite sure how to make them. We were straight-A students, cultured and wise--how hard could it be? The waffles might have been wonderful and delicious had we the common sense to nonstickify the waffle iron and not glue the sides together permanently with burnt batter, but we ended up with Cinnamon Toast Crunch and a tall glass of fresh-squeezed humility, which was as sour as it sounds.
We were barely eighteen and we thought we were pretty smart and pretty mature, but that morning something--maybe the waffle incompetence, maybe having recently seen a woman with a penis and Leonardo DiCaprio taking it from behind, maybe the latent terror of going to college in a few months--made us all want to just check out of the real world for a few hours.
As soon as the waffle iron stopped smoking, we slipped into the backyard, hooked up a sprinkler under the trampoline, and bounced ourselves into some sort of therapeutic hypnosis. We jumped as high as we could, or we barely bent our knees and kept our feet planted, and when one of us got tired, we sat down and let the other two jostle our lazy body. The surface of the trampoline was slick and shiny and went zip-zip-zip when we skated across it on our bare feet. I was wearing B's T-shirt and Br's boxer shorts and we were all soaking wet. There was some laughing, but we didn't really say much. What I remember is the motion and the weightlessness and the sun coming up.
What a fantastic memory. Perfect for a Monday morning. Thank you!