The year was 1963.  It was one of those rare moments when things are on the verge of becoming something else.  We were off to have adventures during a Spring Break, with no direction anywhere, much less home.  It wasn’t like the last time I was out on the road, in March of 2009, and had a Modesto hotel reserved for the end of the day.  This was a different time.  In this time I was not driving, I was certainly not in charge, and I really didn’t care if we had a reservation anywhere, simply because we were on our way.

This was us, the three of us, me, Jack and Dale.  We’d been going to school together forever, and it seemed like we’d always be going to school together.  Little did we know that this 1963 trip was close on the tail when we’d last hang out together as friends.  It was close to Modesto, I’m sure of that, because the Gallo was getting cheaper, and you could find more locals who had good advice on how to drink their special economic offerings.  We’d been through different kinds of juice, but had not considered cranberry, and that might have been the thing that turned everything so very strange.

I don’t really regret 1963, now that it’s 2009, because there’s a lot of water under that bridge.  For many years, I didn’t even care to know where that bridge even was, but now these things do matter, just because I want to be able to do right by the people I knew.  On that trip, there were lots of missed turns, and a hundred directions that went out of our teenage ears.  We did end up somewhere close to Canada, eventually, and it seemed like as good a place as any to stop and get out for awhile.  For me, awhile lasted for some 15 years, and for the others, I don’t know when they made it back home.  If they did, however, I hope they don’t remember the last moments of the trip, because it wasn’t terribly pretty.  But the first part, that was something worth remembering.

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