With wet hair, damp beach towels and dirty thoughts in our hearts we headed back to a car steeped in cigarettes and the sharp scent of hand-me-down-vinyl. I miss those lingering summers during high school filled with suntan oil and sweaty dreams.

We bought gas as the sun set and parked in supermarket lots or dead ends after dark and sometimes drank beer, but mostly talked big about the future with feigned joy to hide our fright.

Acting wise and wearing bad clothes I picked up a friend and we drove to Cape Cod. In my fedora from Goodwill and a tank top I had first seen in pictures of my mother with her long, parted hair and baby-blue eye shadow, I checked the oil and we were ready.

In my heart I am always reaching -- as I did that summer -- for a slippery distance that spills all around off highway exits and unfamiliar street signs, where young men with colored markers scribble away at something across the coffee shop. As I stepped out the door he poked a dollar bill into the fold of my ugly hat. My friend and I opened the bill to look at George Washington decorated as Ace Frehley, just a gaudy rock star. Years later as I approached a toll booth over a bridge in a traffic jam leading away from New York, a city that sits ashore above a pulpy river, I almost lost that dollar. If not for noisy quarters and dimes sliding under my feet, I would have had to pass Mr Frehley as legal tender.

This week flowers spill below my house on a rise, fighting now with Autumn's early leaves.