I last time I had skipped a stone across the water
I was seventeen
it was the waning weeks
before my senior year of high school
on a hot summer evening
after a hard days work on the farm
still covered in dirt and dried sweat
still chewing tobacco because I thought I was cool,
a hot summer evening when we sat on coolers
drinking dirt cheap beer
and listening to classic rock
as we pretended to fish
and we pretended to like the taste of the cheap beer
and we talked about girls
and talked about what we were going to do in a year
since none of our parents went to college
and we sure as hell weren’t going to go
and even community college was out of the question,
it was either farming,
or construction,
or enlisting
but probably enlisting
and we talked about our grandfathers
and where they had fought during the war
and we talked about what branches we wanted to join
and why
and this was before September 11th 2001,
so none of us thought that we might die
and as the beers flowed and the fish slowed
we walked around searching for flat stones
and we skipped them across the water
and that was early August 2001
and a month later my senior year began
and our football team was looking great
and I had a date to the county fair
on the 8th of September
and that’s really the last thing about my youth
that I can remember
because 3 days later was the 11th
and everything after was a patriotic blur
and back then my sister called me incredibly naive
and looking back at it all now, I concur.
Skip ahead a few years,
but minus the beers this time
I was searching once again for flat stones
and after I found a pile of them,
I skipped them one by one
across the lake towards Al-Faw Palace
as the rest of my squad sat around fishing
during our few hour respite
and I was wishing I was anywhere else in the world
as I watched those stones skim the surface
before finding their final resting place
somewhere at the bottom
soitgoes1984 