Five years ago:

Today Molly and I took the Whaler out for a quick joyride, just for the hell of it. We sped across the blue, tacked out east towards the gigantic houses and the outlet, pondering aloud the obscene enormity of those estates. We were going fast and I sat on the prow feeling thrilled as the wind blasted my face, contemplating the sunny expanse of shimmering water.

"I would love to just have a tour of some of those," she yelled over the wind.

"I would love to just sit down with the people who live inside them and listen to them talk; try to figure out how they function."

"The crazy thing is, they probably only use them about two months out of the whole year."

I shook my head sadly, but not too sadly. It was a self-indulgent melancholy and I was aware of the rippling water�s innate beauty as it vanished beneath us at forty miles an hour. We watched the same water get spat out the back in the tiny boat�s spastic wake, and she steered the boat in mad zigzags, veering back and forth so that I had to hold on to the plastic shell.

But then we all slept in this weird one-story motel with really thin flimsy walls and leaking pipes and tacky dark red carpeting. I slept next to Molly; Andrew and Erin in the bed next to us. In the morning we all jumped around like kids on Saturday morning, jumping on the beds and pouncing on each other.

The summer crawls forward, but I feel like I�m being dragged behind it, in the gravel. Eventually everything will settle and the simplicity will preclude anything else that might have once mattered.

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