Wake me up when it's all Over

life is fleeting, in a blink of an eye until it shut forever

Wake me up when it’s all Over… (647 words)

                  

     There’s nothing like the smell of a new-born baby. It’s intoxicating. As you take a deep sniff, your senses remember what it was like to be shiny and new, dreams yet unformed, an awakening, your life’s journey about to begin. You breathe it in and breathe it out. You smile the smile of a life remembered…

 

     My first memories were of me standing in my crib looking out the window. I saw my Mom opening the gate in our backyard and leaving. I felt all alone. I remember crying like a banshee.

 

     I remember when I was five, sitting on a curb of my sidewalk unable to get up and walk. I was afraid. My father picked me up and carried me into the house. I was broken and they sent me to the hospital for a few months to get fixed. I was inflicted with rheumatic fever.

 

     I had my first kiss with a girl at the ripe old age of eleven.  We kissed in a shaded area behind her house where no one would notice us. We held our breaths as we kissed, no tongues (we didn’t know about that stuff) for about a minute or so. We felt so grown up ---it was glorious.

 

     I remember being in Woodstock diving into a mud pond with a girl I just met. She was a flower-child.  We were both as high as rabbits in heat with nothing on but our birthday suits. I was a lad of seventeen. I happily lost my virgin status while Jimmy Hendrix played the national anthem on his guitar.

 

     I was broke and hungry and three thousand miles from home. I was going to be a movie star in the great land of California but first I needed to eat. I got caught shoplifting a package of sausages and a can of coffee at Vonns Supermarket. I remember urinating in my pants as the cop laid his hand on my shoulder. It was a weekend holiday. For three days I was the guest of the Burbank County jail.  When Monday rolled around, we were escorted in an underground passage to the courthouse. Our legs were chained. I thought I was going to prison. It was an eye-opening experience. I was twenty two years old.

 

     I Inhale and exhale the memories of my early years. My mind is flooded with memories of a misspent youth.  I loved every minute of it. To be new and young was fun and exhilarating but those days are long gone and only live on in the cockeyed memories of my mind.   

 

     I’m now in my early sixties living in a well worn body slowly headed towards further wear and tear. Considered old by the more youth orientated in our society but not yet old enough to be put out to pasture---not yet anyway, hopefully, I still got a lot of living to do. I don’t yet have that Old People smell that reeks of decay and impending death but it’s only a matter of time before entropy takes its toll. Hopefully I have another twenty or thirty years left before I become decrepit and smelly.