daily prompt

A Thank You Note

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Has anyone produced a list of the best of 2015’s “Best of …” lists? No? Anyone? This won’t be that. First, a thank you.

Thank you to everyone who reads this website, even if this post is the first one by me that you have seen: Thank you. If The Gad About Town receives its usual number of visitors today, one of you might give this site the 34,000th view it has received in 2015. More than 18,000 visitors have read or at least gazed at almost 34,000 things here. That stuns me.
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Childhood’s End

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The child has few memories, so those he has are detailed.

We were in my hometown for some reason one summer Sunday afternoon a couple years ago and I said to my girlfriend that I wanted to show her where I grew up. (As if I have grown up.) We drove down roads I used to bike on, walk on.

I grew up in the suburbs, in upstate New York, in the 1970s and ’80s, a neighborhood without sidewalks, with kids biking across their neighbors’ lawns (well, I did) without fear of criticism. I remembered knowing which houses had dogs that were poorly restrained (avoid those lawns or else find a new speed in my pumping little legs) and which houses were simply scary for reasons no one could explain but everyone knew which houses simply seemed scary.

(Years later, in high school, I was fundraising or campaigning for something and I dared, out of my OCD-ish sense/need to knock on every single door in the neighborhood, I knocked on the door of one of the houses that I always thought was scary. The owner was as friendly and nice as could be. I felt like I had discovered something.)
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Age Is Just a Place

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One friend, upon hearing me describe a new ache or an old pain, used to say to me, “You’ve never been (insert age here) before!”

At first, I found this insulting, then, later, quite insulting. But knowing the friend as I did, I eventually realized that he was not being dismissive when he said this, but was instead reminding me to do something I did not have a long history of doing: To pay attention to my body. He has since passed on and will remain forever 65.

He was saying that almost everything we experience is unique to us, yet not at all unique. That sentence is either wise in its simpleness, so simple and wise that “simpleness” is too complicated a word for it, or it is incredibly banal. It’s all of the above: We are all growing older. I’ve never been 47 before. So there it is. That’s where I live.
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