Then I got tired and left

Last November, I made time.

So often, I've looked at the Gorge Waterway from the bus, as it takes the loop en route to Silver City. It was a glorious morning, so I left home a good hour before I had to, and got off the bus, misguidedly, at a hairpin curve on Gorge Road, but made it across unscathed.

And there it was. My adolescence.

An uprooted tree, had toppled head down in the Gorge, wasps buzzing around its corpse. Was it there when I cycled along here in Grade Nine? Am I really so old?

There were the same steps, the one leading down into the water. I used to sit here, waiting for the boy I secretly loved - who was in love with my best friend, of course.

I almost wanted to balance along the very edge, as I did as a nine-year-old, when the bricks were being slowly piled. Beyond was the playground, swings still there, but in a slightly different location. No teeter-totters in this litigious age. The clammy change-room for swimmers oblivious to concepts such as fecal counts stands behind, and in front, a bank of vegetation blocks the view of the beach.

I turned up the steep incline leading to the crosswalk. My legs remembered it better than my head. At the intersection, there are now traffic lights, and a push-button walk signal in the direction of my old elementary school.

No more "Stop students! Traffic through!" sung out by a military-inspired student crossing-guard trio, marching down to their corner:  
Left! Left! Left! Left!
I had a good job and I left! I had a good job and I left!
First, they hired me, then they fired me, then I got tired and left!
Left! Left! Left!

Up Admirals Road, where a huge yellow seniors residence has replaced the corner-store, and a couple of houses. I glanced in, and a lady in a dressing gown waved.

I waved back.

On up the hill to the duplex. An older lady was already peering down the drive.

"I never realized there was a house back there."
"It's a duplex. I lived in this one by the street, and the Wardens lived in the back one."

She told me how she and her husband, newly-wed, got together a thousand dollars for a down-payment on a modest house we could see from our standpoint. I thought to myself that a thousand dollars would have been a humongous amount when this lady was a young married. She was telling me her life story as the bus I meant to catch rolled by.

I caught the next one.