The Edge Of The World

A cold morning in the 60's. I walked up the modest hill to elementary school. Our class was middle class. My favorite time of day was recess...and lunch. We were set free to fly the concrete ramp as fast as we could to get to our Olympus, the playground, which was larger than the campus. We played German dodgeball on asphalt and shot marbles in the gutter that ran around the peri- meter of the chain-link fence. In the corner was an open drain that usually had at least one orange potato bug to squash. But the most numinous sight to be seen on that mostly grassy rectangle was the surrounding fog that semed to stop dead at our hill-top fantasyland. We imagined that this was the end of the globe. To climb off would be to disappear into oblivion. So we stayed on our earthbound spaceship, running all over single digit years, until our metanoia made us never return. We sought new worlds to experience, each age beating us in a different way, causing individual deaths. Child, teen, adult lives from which some would inevitably escape. Hordes of us remaining blessedly remembering decades of ecstasy at being able to pass the next level.