Disaffected Days

Disaffected Days

(“I, even I, am the One Who takes away your sins because of Who I am. And I will not remember your sins.” Isaiah 43:25)

The water sounded sweet as black earth,
the sand was sun-warmed and loose between our toes
when we ran to meet the waves head-on;
the hair on our arms and legs standing on end
when the Pacific grabbed our breath the first day
of each summer.

A blond-haired beach-boy played the flute solo
from “California Dreamin’”, where the sand and
asphalt met.
He sat on a driftwood hunk of an old tree trunk,
maybe from the islands, probably from Newport,
and every pretty girl watched him while I wished
I had a tan like his.

Some days it didn’t matter at all, like when Paco, his
brothers and my young white legs took one of the next
Saturdays that summer; probably Huntington Beach.
His dad drove the old pickup, faded green with tires
in the bed. Five boys in trunks and towels had the
best view of the freeway all the way to our day in the sun.
We held our burritos between our feet. The stayed warm,
wrapped in wax paper, aluminum foil and hidden in
brown paper bags. Paco’s mom was a magician;
last night’s supper of potatoes and pork were our
midmorning breakfast in the back of the rattling
Ford.

My best friend was my worst enemy; I do not lie.
One moment we were ranking girls in our junior-high classroom,
the next he pinned me in a telephone booth, blackened me eye,
all because he was bigger than me.

Perhaps our final touchdown after half a dozen orbits,
or, if we’re truly ambitious, a trip to the moon,
perhaps our final splashdown has more to do
with pick-up trucks, tanned flautists, and friends
(or enemies) we never forget. Like the taste of

Those roast potatoes, stringy pork, tangy sauce,
all wrapped up by Paco’s mom in the sweetest
flour taco a young man ever tasted.

If I could find her today, nearly a half-century later,
I ask if she had just one more burrito, the kind with
pork and potatoes.