Then and Now

At the last minute, I took a right and headed passed the gates into the park. For all intents and purposes, I looked like a mom picking up her child from soccer practice, my black work pants absorbing the heat of the day as I stepped out of the car. Nevertheless, I made my way across the street to the grass. I passed a woman with "True Blue" splashed across her shirt, which was more a shade of lavender, and a girl spread out on a yoga mat, head bopping side to side. I pod ear buds in her ears, I was puzzled as to how she planned to channel her soul's center while listening to "Boom Boom Pow."

I chose a spot between two trees, one much older than the other. The younger greener one was very much alive, the other not so, but for the life going on beneath it, birds pecking at the ground, picking up pine needles, strewn about like fallen soldiers, the remains of a battle fought against Time. I sat at the peak of the hill, just enough on the slope to see down onto the soccer field, carved out of the surrounding hills like the center of a summer melon. I slipped off my red shoes and put them next to my red sweater. Red and red. Noticing my more-pink-than-red toenails, I sidled them up to my sweater, quite pleased with the discord; I liked the unpredictability of it all. Red. Red. Pink. I opened my book and began to read.

I was distracted from time to time by the sun bouncing off the lining of my red shoes, the gold insides faded from use. And, if it wasn't the shoes, it was the soccer practice going on below. With my fingers, I added up how many years I spent down on that very field. How many times I jogged its perimeter. The corner kick drills we ran near the white goal post. The very goal post where I did my first (and most likely last) diving header. Sometimes, when the field was covered with snow, we'd play in the parking lot where the snow plow had been, digging our cleats into the asphalt to stop us from slipping on the cold, wet pavement. Oh how I would have given anything back then to trade in my cleats for a pair of red shoes.

I watched three men jog around the field, their shadows cast long behind them. Stripping themselves of their bright yellow pennants as they went, they gathered up the orange cones. In mere moments, the field was vacant, except for a couple playing frisbee on the sideline. My eyes moved from one word to the next on the page, until the sun stopped gleaming off the insides of my ruby shoes. I folded down the corner of my book, made my way past the two trees, across the grass and into my car, merging into the six o'clock traffic towards home.