My first full year as a vocational teacher ended on June 22nd, just eight days after celebrating my fiftieth birthday. The career change came after spending twenty-five years of long, tiring days and many late nights, working in damp cellars and moldy bathrooms, and this change was long overdue. I was glad to be off my aching patellas and back in high school. Not that the plumbing trade had short-changed me; my three boys all had braces on their teeth and had never gone to bed hungry. I asked for nothing more. I was fortunate to have survived with a willing and spirited attitude, many tradesman do not. When the opportunity to teach at the Regional presented itself and I was hired, it was as if the book I was trapped inside had finally turned the page and I was able to begin the next chapter of my life, one I had only pawed at in the past.

Soon after starting, my breaths became noticeably deeper and more relaxed. I was immediately reconnected to who I was before I had unwillingly exited childhood and had abruptly entered into adulthood, a place where my breaths had become shorter, more rapid, and uncomfortably incomplete.

When the buses pulled away from the Regional in mid June and headed into the summer, I somehow felt rejuvenated, like a lifetime of stress and fatigue had been lifted off my soul. I realized in that moment that having only the summer in my sights was every bit as refreshing at the half century mark as it had been many years ago when I pedaled my pirated bicycle through the old neighborhood with a full-blown boyish grin and on healthy knees. I couldn't help but allow my thoughts to wander recklessly and I began thinking about the first days of summer and my childhood friends...

Richard lived in one of the larger homes in the blue-collar neighborhood I grew up in thirty miles south of Boston during the mid sixties. Unlike the majority of the single-story ranches built on postage stamp lots populating the suburban development, his was a newer two-story home with an attached two-car garage bordered by woods and several other similar style houses. His father was an electrician and word was electricians made good money. Normy earned every bit of it too, working all the time. I never saw him wearing anything but well-traveled work clothes. He was old school and worked for quite a long time out of the family's old station wagon. It was a mess, with tools, spools of wire and boxes full of electrical parts establishing permanent residence in the back

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