Hashtag throwback Thursday to the sweet streets of the east side of Buffalo, New York. Here is a photograph of me with my sister. I have no idea where my brothers were when this photograph was taken, probably on the train tracks throwing rocks, or behind the garage kissing girls. In my youthful milk belly days I was a mischievous, troublesome, disorderly hellion whose sarcastic demeanor at the gumball machine was the stuff of legend, but my sister was a confection, and under her tutelage I learned politeness and kindness, and generally outgrew my rude behaviors.

Hashtag throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph from 1978. In the old days, photographs were printed and kept in books, or shoeboxes. They were pulled out and looked at and looked at and looked at until they bent and creased, and then they were unbent and smoothed back with the palm of a hand and looked at again. The smartest people wrote descriptions on the back of them, but the smartest people were usually the elderly, and by the time they thought to write on the backs they had forgotten many of the details associated with the photograph. Luckily, on the back of this photograph is written, “Doug, David, and Heather, 1978. USA.” USA here did not mean the country, it meant a skating rink just past the east side of Buffalo, New York. It is gone now. It was scraped away to make room for a big box store. A Home Depot. This is what they do now, they knock down the uniqueness and put in its place the sameness. USA. But on the back of this photograph USA stood for United Skates of America and the youth of our neighborhood and adjoining neighborhoods met there on Thursday and Friday and Saturday nights, ostensibly to skate, but more than likely to smoke, drink, and kiss. We were in the becoming stage. We were becoming ourselves and we were sampling it all. Fistfights were not uncommon, because what is becoming without a fight. It was always some squabble over a girl that was settled swiftly in the back lot where glass bottles lay empty. But enough of that. The music poured out of the speakers and into our ears and we moved, swirling in and around each other. The best skaters, of which group my oldest brother belonged, would look as though they were floating from blank space to blank space. Gliding between the slower skaters, moving in perfect sympathy with the music and in an instant becoming the music, becoming the physical embodiment of the music so that if you watched you were seeing the music in long arcs that weaved around and between the slower skaters who themselves, if you took the time to look, were lost in the music too. They were moving at their own speed while around them everything whirled and turned. Looking at this photograph and turning it over and reading the cursive, it occurred to me that many years later, after I am gone, this photograph will be found and the finder will have no reference to what the USA on the back stands for, they will think it is the country, and so this throwback. I throw it back so that the hallowed wooden floor of United Skates of America is not forgotten. So that the freedom of that floor is not lost. So that the beat up rental wall of skates still stands silent like a sculpture and like a sculpture carries with it the essence of that time and place. The essence was in the rusting cars and the factories where our fathers once worked. It was in the way we drank and smoked and worked at becoming adults. We lied and laughed and joshed and joked. We dressed in our best jeans and terry cloth shirts. What was it within me that stammered and halted as I went up to the girl with the eyes that shone like two wet stones and calmly asked her to skate? What was it within her that said yes? This is what we did. At the start of the slow songs, the lights went down and the rink thinned and the boys and girls of America asked each other to skate. Remarkably, I asked, and remarkably she took my hand and dragged me to the floor and we skated in a circle slowly. We talked and smiled and she took her hand, when it got sweaty, and wiped it on her jeans and then took my hand again, and wasn’t that something, I thought, the way she took it away and wiped it off and then reached for my hand again. In an instant it was over and the lights went back on and we were engulfed in the throng again. In the smell of alcohol and smoke. There was a cherry red skate box emblazoned with hot rod stickers advertising Moroso and STP under a bench. There was a paper plate with a cigarette bent into the center on a sticky table. Socks and paper cups crumpled on dirty rugs, but the music swept it all up into something beautiful and true. We found a place to be alone in that sea of becoming. We sat with our backs against a wall, our knees touching each other, everything new and pressing. The moments ripping away towards the unknown tomorrows but we leaned in closer against it, certain of each other, certain that nothing would hold us back, that we would be propelled cleanly into the America of our golden future, whirling and turning through the obstacles and defeats smoothly. We would be hooting and hollering and turning and slashing and slowing to take it all in, to hold tight to the freedom of that moment for all of our moments. Looking at us again stopped on that thin sheet of photo paper I remember the details; I turn the photograph over, smooth it out with the palm of my hand and beneath the USA write United Skates of America. The rest of the words are on the front. In the image on the front if you look close enough you can make out the words USA, and freedom, and youth, and yearning, and innocence, and truth, and hope.

Hashtag throwback Thursday. This past weekend driving through my neighborhood I saw three little girls chasing each other with spray bottles on a square of green in their front lawn, squirting each other with water and laughing in the sun. Is this what old age is? The noticing of the tiniest of moments that surround you and then send you hurtling backwards in time and space. Here is a photograph of me and my sister. It is summer on the east side of Buffalo, New York. We are at our grandmother’s house on Dorris. Everything is overgrown and there is the roaring quiet of the heat. My sister is ten years older than me. This is before we became aware of ourselves.  This is before the world set its fangs in us. Before disappointments and heartache and death would take away the people who loved us most. I was reminded of this photograph by the three little girls playing on a lawn a thousand miles and many years away from the time it was taken.  My sister has children older than we were then. They are making lives of their own now with their own memories of my sister. Her oldest might remember our grandmother. There is a photograph of her with my mother, my grandmother, and my sister that is framed in my sister’s house. But this. She has never seen this photograph. She has never seen her mother in this moment. When my sister was buoyant and unbothered and sunny. This is not to say that she isn’t still all of these things, she is, but as you all know life sometimes wipes away the idealism of youth and replaces it with a pragmatism that in comparison might seem dull. This is what I want to say to my nieces and nephew. This is what I want to say to you. That in our youth we were thirsty for the spectacle of it all. For the smell of the earth after a rain, for the way the winter succumbed to a soggy April which turned chartreuse then filled in and became the plump and overgrown summer. We shouted at the awe of the drawn world. We raced through the sheets flapping on the line. We drew white lines on the pavement with rocks. We filled our bellies with the water from the garden hose. You can see the girl stopped in this photograph in my sisters eyes now if you look close enough. If you pay attention and listen you can see the airy girl in the photograph rising up, you can see that she never disappeared, but I want to add something to the photograph. I want to add to it the moment that wasn’t captured. The moment so obvious it didn’t need to be captured. The moment just before we went outside in anticipation of the beautiful mysteries that the world had in store for us, before we knew what all of those mysteries might be, and drank it in.

Hashtag Throwback Thursday. As I recount my youth on the east side of Buffalo, New York, I am trying to understand what it was then that somehow stays with me and makes me see the world in the way that I do today. I have touched on this before but only peripherally so I want to be clear. I want to make sure you understand that it was the emotional and physical strength of the women in my neighborhood that had a profound effect on me. Of course, at the time, my thinking was the complete opposite. Instead, the women of that neighborhood, my mother, grandmother, aunts, nuns, and the mothers of my friends were as rigid at the statue of Mary that graced every backyard. Their suggestions and directions were largely ignored once we bicycled out of the neighborhood and made our way into the fields and thin slices of woods where we hunted snakes and found the soggy cardboard mats of old hobo camps where waterlogged issues of Playboy or Hustler introduced us to another world. We turned those pages with a stick and talked big, piling lie onto lie. This was in the time of BMX, skateboards, and stolen bottles of beer from the refrigerators of our fathers. We built fires and poured gasoline on them. We swore at each other and made crude remarks behind the backs of the priests and nuns who taught us. We drank warm beer and smashed the bottles against brick walls and then we went home to a hot meal made from some recipe that was handed down through generations. We were oblivious until we weren’t. We were rude and cruel in the woods. We were nasty on the ice playing hockey. We spat. We yelled. We used our fists and then we didn’t because we had discovered the girls of our neighborhood. They were our equals in every way, except one, they knew, in addition to the ordinary vulgarities of the neighborhood, how to temper that hardness with a softness. They would say, in the scrub of woods where we played, look at that bluebird, and we saw. At the lake, they would float on their backs way out and when they came in they talked about the quiet way the clouds moved over them. They had knowledge in seeing and feeling that we didn’t and we found ourselves changed. My best friend, whose hair was fire and whose knuckles were raw was so overcome he made grand gestures. Once he bought a bouquet of flowers and walked through all of us and handed them to the girl of his dreams. We all laughed and moved aside uneasily. With those flowers his hands became soft, his hair glowing embers. I too was swept away from brutal things. Here, on the shores of Lake Erie, a photograph was taken. It is a photograph of me and my first girlfriend. She lived a block away from me on Roebling. She knew how to spit and swear. She could do little tricks on her bicycle. She stood beside me on the beach, and when in my awkwardness I stood oddly, she put her hand on my neck and caressed it before moving it to my shoulder as if to say it’s okay, pull me close I won’t break, and I did and I could feel her power and the water fell in sighs on the shore and the sun burned bright. It burned away the coarseness and then it began to slowly set and it cast everything in perfect light. All at once I saw everything clearly. It was the way my grandmother showed my mother how to make dumplings. It was the way my father listened, directing all of his attention to my mother. It was my mother canning peaches at the end of summer for those moments in the long harsh winter when she would open them up for us, and they glowed like a sun and tasted of the summer when a girl put her hand on my shoulder and made me realize the power of softness and how it remakes the harshness into something more beautiful, the bluebird in the scrub of trees. The embers at the end of a fire. The light. The light. The light.

Hashtag Throwback Thursday, circa 1980 to the sweet streets of Buffalo's east side. Here I am smoking a cigarette I had pilfered from the purse of my lovely Aunt Laura who kept a canary that was yellower than the turtleneck I relentlessly wore. My Aunt lived above her sister in a spotless apartment. She smoked several packs of non-filtered Lucky Strikes a day and she kept a yellow canary, that sang sweetly, in a cage. She also kept a covered glass dish on her coffee table full of Hershey’s Kisses. There was something about lifting the lid to grab a kiss that made the chocolate seem finer than the mass produced piece it was. But enough of that. Though I didn’t know it at the time, in regard to love, I was some lesser, but no less important, Antoine Doinel. I am with my gaggle of goons. We had been wandering around the neighborhood as we were wont to do in those days, laughing, riding handmade skateboards, playing stickball, gambling, and lighting small things on fire, generally before the street lights came on. This was in the time of tube socks, banana seats, and pay telephones. I was clearly delighted with myself, having just held the sweaty hand of my first love who momentously took her hand from mine to wipe the sweat onto her Jordache jeans before entwining her fingers into mine again. It was then that I realized all things were possible. We broke up a day later via a note passed in music class where my joy of being next in line to play the xylophone was greatly diminished by the words "i’m sorry” with a broken heart in place of the dot over the lowercase i on a sheet of snow white paper folded into eighths. She had found another. The first of many such experiences in my young life. But this was before that note. We were walking our familiar streets. There the barber. There the butcher. There the lot where we played hockey. We were untamed, bodily, and brutal. We laughed with our mouths open, we spit and swore, stumbling towards the things of adulthood. The holding of hands, the kissing and touching. The overwhelming beating of our hearts in our fine, thin, chests that we ignored by making sarcastic remarks or setting small things on fire that belied our true feelings. Those feelings that we felt when we held the hand of the girl in the perfectly blue jeans or when we heard the sound of that bright bird cut through the silence, or lifted the lid of a glass bowl to reveal the treasure of a tinfoil wrapped kiss.