rebecca_in_blue | Strange how the night moves, with autumn closin' in...

I went for a bike ride on Saturday evening – loving this fall weather while it lasts – and stopped by Grandma's house for something to eat. My cousin Eva is staying there while her parents are out-of-town. She and I watched some NCIS and played Speed, a card game that Athena and I used to play religiously when we were her age. I remember giving Athena a Peanuts deck of cards for her birthday one year, which we thought was the be-all, end-all of cool.

Eva said she loves walking at night but never gets to do it because no one ever wants to go with her. I said she should have been born into my family. (Just kidding, I would never wish that on her. But between us, we do everything at night – walking, running laps, bike riding, etc.) It took us forever to convince our crazy grandma to let us go, but I took Eva on a walk to my old high school. It was already dark, even though it wasn't that late, and lots of houses in the neighborhood had Halloween-colored lights and glow-in-the-dark skeletons strung up. We ran all over the campus, climbing up the bleachers, peering in windows at the classrooms, and ducking down to hide whenever a car drove by. I felt kinda stupid, but it was fun. Eva tripped and cut her hand at one point, and when we got home, she told Grandma she'd been in a knife fight.

It felt so strange seeing the school at night like that. I couldn't stop thinking about the four years of my life spent there, the person I was then, and all the things I learned – most of which, except for the French classes, I've now forgotten. In fact, I wrote the Paul Simon lyric “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school / It's a wonder I can think at all” in a big Sharpie marker across the front of the zipper binder I used for my junior and senior years. It's even stranger to think that I graduated from there over seven years ago. Damn.

I found out today that yesterday night, around the time Eva and I were running around, my Grandma's longtime neighbor passed away. “Ain't it funny how the night moves / When you just don't seem to have as much to lose?”