You Won’t Know Until Later

The restaurant you won’t go back to, and the endings you forget

Your table for the evening (La Cucina Italiana photo)

The Weirdo

When I was around twelve, my brother and I spent many summer days in different friends’ backyards playing a version of dodgeball I think we might have invented.

Everything was fluid: you could run, be chased, hide behind bushes, push another kid toward the ball holder, deflect or dive out of the way when the ball came at you. When you were hit, you became “it,” the one chasing everyone else.

We could keep going for hours -- sweating, screeching, laughing so hard we teared up -- until our mothers called us home for dinner. Each kid would head back with grass stains on his clothes, dirt under his fingernails, cheeks and hair covered in dust, exhausted. Good times.

One day, one of the kids’ fathers stood at his patio door, deep in thought, hands on his hips, vacantly staring into the yard where we were racing around and giggling. He was surely younger than I am now, but he seemed old -- thinning hair, a slight stoop.

After a while, one of the friends stopped in front of him and asked what he was thinking about. The rest of us gathered to hear.

“One day you kids are going to play together for the last time,” the father said. “Only you won’t know it was the last time until much later.”

Weirdo, I thought.