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Bill Garten

They always ask me for a secret one, and I always pick the same one,
about my favorite childhood friend—his name was Stuart—
we knew each other for three years. Played together dawn to dusk.
At age six, we tried to bring a frozen Floridian baby ten-inch alligator back to life,

a pet left over from our once-a-year family vacation, left out in
West Virginia snow; Stuart and I ran its stiff body under hot spigot water,
only to find out, as two young boys could, there are some things one
cannot recover from, cannot get back once they have been done.

One summer day, Stuart moved and was waving goodbye through his parents’
Plymouth back window. I never heard from or saw Stuart again.
The old couple who moved in his house next door would sit on their back porch
in the evening, drinking iced tea. I would pick honeysuckle and climb

the wobbly wire fence between our houses. I would ask them questions
about what it was like being old. My mother one evening brought out a tray
full of ice-cream cones and I turned too quickly; my ankle caught
in the square wires above the concrete. I fell into a concussion of darkness.

At the hospital I woke, comforted,
one of the few times I was ever in my father’s arms.

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