The remains of my chocolate-strawberry pancakes dry and crust to my plate in the early-summer morning. We sit bare-chested on the porch, basking in the shriveled and spent fireworks containers that litter the streets.

“I miss my childhood, is what it boils down to. Those were the best days of my life,” he says.

There was the heat, the immovable blanket that kept him in bed until noon. There were long nights spent in galaxies very far from here, defending earth from alien invasions with friends. There were hiking trails lit by the green-tinged hue of sunlight cascading through a canopy of ancient douglas firs and prehistoric ferns. These are the things he tells me of summers past in the State of Jefferson. These are the things he tells me of the best days of his life.

His tone isn’t morose as mine would be, knowing the best years of my life had already been lived, but there was no gleeful recollection of some punch line to a joke either. Instead he continues reassembling his childhood before my eyes, tapping into memories like so many kegs he had tapped so many summers ago.  Dutifully.

A thousand-yard-stare sweeps over his visage as the Illinois River flows off of his tongue and he remembers the steep black gorge walls and crystal cold water. The bridge was seventy feet high, but that wasn’t enough. The rope would arc beneath before swinging up, up. Up he would fly before whirling through the air, dancing in gravity. And then the pumice of icy water would scrub the summer heat from his body. It couldn’t be colder at the source, and even now in the heat of the summer sun, goosebumps spring up on his arms from the thought.

Then there was the beer, the cold, crumpled cans of beer that piled up in basement corners and burnt out firepits. And the camping beneath the stars with the snow-capped peaks hanging in the distant darkness, and hours spent gazing into a dancing bonfire. The road trips too. Waking up at dawn and arriving at the coast, just in time to smell the salt in the air and see the great yellow orb of sunlight dip below the horizon. And then pack back into the car to retreat, like the tide. For him, it was never about the destination. All that mattered was the road, the people, and heat of the summer, driving him to explore.

Slowly, his eyes focus, rising up from the depths of the river of time. There’s new hope dancing in his voice.

“A full tank of gas, and all the time in the world…that’s all you need.”