The Frisbee haunts me.
It’s been poking out of a cardboard box on the back stairway for months, a box full of other games I didn’t get to. A baseball bat and glove. Balls soft and base. A bubble wand. Various juggling apparati and old pump-up water rockets that phwish into the sky.
I didn’t get to any of them this summer, but only the Frisbee annoys.
It’s a small white one, a dinged and scratched little beast offered as a free promotional for a newspaper where I used to work.
“Kane County Chronicle • 7 Days a Week • Starting August 3”
I haven’t played with it in years. Nor the baseball bat. Nor the glove. I got to the bubble wand and pump-up water rocket in 2014.
It’s getting too cold to Fris.
Summer is gone, I have to concede that. I wandered the Gold Coast tonight after getting let out of work early for weather purposes (damn outdoor job).
Sweaters. Jackets. Hats. Hustling to destinations rather than letting the night air be their goal. People tugging on the chains of their over-bred fluff monsters to get Snookums to pee a little faster so they can get back in to TV and sedentary lives.
I love fall, I do. But the transition to early-dark nights that are just going to get earlier and darker when the world gets hiked back an hour is always a jarring one. It reminds me of all the things I didn’t do rather than did, all the missed days of beach and Frisbee.
I played a lot this summer, I did. Bikes and picnics, reading in parks and hours-long walks where the only purpose was feeling the heat trickling down the back of my neck before I bought ice cream from a man pushing a little cart. I have nothing to gripe about other than that damn tilted axis and the transition to a hunker-down winter.
No adult can play as much as I want to, seven days a week like my Frisbee taunts. I don’t know if I should even try. I live a feckless enough life as is without water rockets and softball.
We can’t play every day. We can’t always schedule moments of childish joy amid the commutes, bills and laundry detergent that defines our oh-so-serious adult lives.
But I would be a liar if I said I didn’t want to try.
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