Adams Avenue

~ Adams Avenue

I can drive past Adams Avenue

but I cannot turn, cannot enter the neighborhood

and search slowly uphill

for the house where my cousins grew up.

If I do, my small self will still be there

sitting on the cement steps

eating canned pears from a gold melamine dish.

My pale summer hair will weigh nothing

and neither will my sundress

or my white sandals with the silver buckles.

My cousin David will still be alive,

wrestling Kit to the grass in front of me,

proving he’s the older, stronger brother

if not the bigger one.

Or maybe, driving by, I’d hear David on his new drum set,

pounding out a demonstration with great seriousness,

all of us a captive audience in the tiny den

that was a single car garage until my aunt needed a place

where four boys could spill over.

It would be too risky to drive by

while the neighborhood kids are still over

playing Kick the Can with us.

What if I made a run for it

from behind the trunk of the neighbors’ pin oak

and saw my 42-year-old self

behind the wheel of a strange, small car?

It could be, though, that all would be quiet from the outside.

Maybe, at this particular time,

I would still be in the basement by the ping pong table

watching David hit redial again and again

after the radio station played Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”

and promised movie tickets to the ninth caller.

Some days, like today, I take the cross street

to drop off my son for early band practice

or to pick up a prescription from the 24-hour pharmacy.

My thoughts are on the situation at work

or whether it’s time to get the dog groomed,

and suddenly there’s the street sign,

the tree-shrouded entrance to the old neighborhood

where I am still climbing a tree faster than the boys

or waiting on the swingset for David’s time-out to be over.

It is always summer there, and we are always playing

with an urgency and a football-huddle intimacy,

making up the rules as we go

and squeezing in as much of our game as possible

before the sun sets,

when the intensity of our play accelerates

with the world darkening around us--

every post-sunset minute a triumph,

a prize stolen from the grown-up world

that can never be taken away.

David giving me a kiss when we were little.

Cousins.