When Colors Wane (Return Again)

For a while now I had the suspicion that I'd fade away like the simplest memory. That at the end of a day sometime in the near future, I would become the diminishing recollection of a grandson I could not influence. It was almost too easy for me to consider my future, and to think back on my childhood youth, and all but realize that I could not return. I sense that few of us understand our departure from the naive imagination, however immature it was, and however misunderstood we were. We can never go back. I can never go back. And I'd argue that some of us feel that way: that we could return sometime in the next fifty years to those moments when we were twelve, passing the ball across the black top, running wildly into the grass, cartwheeling over clover patches, and digging around inside our desks, grabbing at objects that would allow our minds to wander away from what our teachers lectured about. But, no matter, I will awake tomorrow with the same misunderstanding: that I will become a child again, and that I will not fall apart like all things, and that when I ponder the empty spaces left on this earth, there will be something to fill them with architecture, with love, passion, propriety, fullness, and color.