Zach Hebert's Blog
September 16, 2011
Five Years
Five Years
by
Zachariah Hebert
When I was three, my world consisted of my grandparent’s home and the little fenced in yard surrounding it. Back then, it was the smells of pancakes and floor polish that reminded me that I was home. I saw my mom on the weekends sometimes, because she was in school and there was nothing in Franklin for her then, except me. I had a bear named Cookie that watched over me while I slept, and, truth be told, still sits in a place of reverence on my bookshelf headboard to this day. Some things you just can’t let go of.
By age eight, I was living in Lafayette, a bigger city, though my own scope hadn’t expanded much. I’d met Ian, then, and our afternoons, when he could sneak out, were spent tearing through the woods that, back then, ran along the entire stretch of road behind our houses. In those woods, there were secrets and hidden stories and places to lose ourselves. There were also places to hide from real life, where abusive mothers and worries of whether there would be food next week could be left behind. Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I would sneak out the window and go and lie beneath the boughs of a massive pine tree, near the center of the forest, and, warm on the bed of pine needles beneath a blanket we’d left out there, fall asleep under the stars, because there was something comforting about being in the presence of something so much bigger than I was.
At thirteen, my world was a little larger, though not as much so as I’d have liked. I spent the time when I wasn’t sleeping, as I so often wasn’t, walking the streets or, God help me, in the mall. In those days, you could still smoke in the café at the center, not that I did, and the waterfall still ran most nights. Ian and I would sit and play Magic and visit with the various miscreants and outcasts that happened across our paths. We’d play hide and seek in the underground tunnels that ran behind and below the stores, which we knew better than the constantly shifting security force. We’d have water gun fights with guns we’d bought for a dollar, back when there was a dollar store (I think they sell overpriced watches now, where it used to be). We’d gorge ourselves on candy we’d stolen, because we were too poor to pay ten dollars for snowcaps. It wasn’t right, but, back then, that only made it all the sweeter. He met his first real girlfriend there, and so did I.
Cafes and all-night diners were my havens at eighteen. Ian and I didn’t see each other as much anymore as we’d have liked. We both had other friends who we spent more of our time with. Mine were named things like Kerouac, Yeats, and Gaiman, his went by Jack, Boone, and Jose. We’d both surrounded ourselves with dime store philosophers, artists, and musicians, and fooled ourselves into thinking we were our own special brand of different.
Those were nights when we felt like we would live forever. Everyone has nights like that, when you’re eighteen and there is nothing but you and the road and the music that spoke to you then in a way that it never would again, no matter how hard you tried to hold on to it. It’s part of what makes us who we are. In those moments, short, sweet, and, inevitably, underappreciated, we found within ourselves the truest evidence of divinity I ever have. The world was open, boundless, and full of a quiet expectation that possessed the possibility for nothing and everything just beneath the surface. We, right then, were immortal.
By twenty-three, strangers were living in the house where I’d grown up, my grandparents having passed away a few years back. They tore the woods down, little by little, to build low rent housing, starting when I was sixteen and finishing up the last piece on my twentieth birthday. For a while, I used to go and sit under the giant old pine tree, now in the middle of an independent living hostel for the elderly and infirmed, until they asked me not to come by anymore, because some of the residents were complaining that I was trespassing.
The city, too, had changed. The mall had since been overtaken by Gap-clones and, inevitably, because of the entire elitist premise upon which the Gap and places like it were built, the “we’re-better-than-the-Gap” clones, and we were never welcome in either. The diners and cafes were all car dealerships and pizza places. I spent a lot of time at his grave then, because, like the pine tree, it still felt like home somewhere inside of me, and it helped to know that there was, maybe, still something bigger.
by
Zachariah Hebert
When I was three, my world consisted of my grandparent’s home and the little fenced in yard surrounding it. Back then, it was the smells of pancakes and floor polish that reminded me that I was home. I saw my mom on the weekends sometimes, because she was in school and there was nothing in Franklin for her then, except me. I had a bear named Cookie that watched over me while I slept, and, truth be told, still sits in a place of reverence on my bookshelf headboard to this day. Some things you just can’t let go of.
By age eight, I was living in Lafayette, a bigger city, though my own scope hadn’t expanded much. I’d met Ian, then, and our afternoons, when he could sneak out, were spent tearing through the woods that, back then, ran along the entire stretch of road behind our houses. In those woods, there were secrets and hidden stories and places to lose ourselves. There were also places to hide from real life, where abusive mothers and worries of whether there would be food next week could be left behind. Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I would sneak out the window and go and lie beneath the boughs of a massive pine tree, near the center of the forest, and, warm on the bed of pine needles beneath a blanket we’d left out there, fall asleep under the stars, because there was something comforting about being in the presence of something so much bigger than I was.
At thirteen, my world was a little larger, though not as much so as I’d have liked. I spent the time when I wasn’t sleeping, as I so often wasn’t, walking the streets or, God help me, in the mall. In those days, you could still smoke in the café at the center, not that I did, and the waterfall still ran most nights. Ian and I would sit and play Magic and visit with the various miscreants and outcasts that happened across our paths. We’d play hide and seek in the underground tunnels that ran behind and below the stores, which we knew better than the constantly shifting security force. We’d have water gun fights with guns we’d bought for a dollar, back when there was a dollar store (I think they sell overpriced watches now, where it used to be). We’d gorge ourselves on candy we’d stolen, because we were too poor to pay ten dollars for snowcaps. It wasn’t right, but, back then, that only made it all the sweeter. He met his first real girlfriend there, and so did I.
Cafes and all-night diners were my havens at eighteen. Ian and I didn’t see each other as much anymore as we’d have liked. We both had other friends who we spent more of our time with. Mine were named things like Kerouac, Yeats, and Gaiman, his went by Jack, Boone, and Jose. We’d both surrounded ourselves with dime store philosophers, artists, and musicians, and fooled ourselves into thinking we were our own special brand of different.
Those were nights when we felt like we would live forever. Everyone has nights like that, when you’re eighteen and there is nothing but you and the road and the music that spoke to you then in a way that it never would again, no matter how hard you tried to hold on to it. It’s part of what makes us who we are. In those moments, short, sweet, and, inevitably, underappreciated, we found within ourselves the truest evidence of divinity I ever have. The world was open, boundless, and full of a quiet expectation that possessed the possibility for nothing and everything just beneath the surface. We, right then, were immortal.
By twenty-three, strangers were living in the house where I’d grown up, my grandparents having passed away a few years back. They tore the woods down, little by little, to build low rent housing, starting when I was sixteen and finishing up the last piece on my twentieth birthday. For a while, I used to go and sit under the giant old pine tree, now in the middle of an independent living hostel for the elderly and infirmed, until they asked me not to come by anymore, because some of the residents were complaining that I was trespassing.
The city, too, had changed. The mall had since been overtaken by Gap-clones and, inevitably, because of the entire elitist premise upon which the Gap and places like it were built, the “we’re-better-than-the-Gap” clones, and we were never welcome in either. The diners and cafes were all car dealerships and pizza places. I spent a lot of time at his grave then, because, like the pine tree, it still felt like home somewhere inside of me, and it helped to know that there was, maybe, still something bigger.
