A Sunset

    When you look back on your childhood, you tend to think of it as having lasted a long time, like half your life--the half that was your childhood and the half that is your adulthood. That is true for a little while, when you're in your twenties and just beginning to get in touch with your adult self. But even as time goes on, we tend to regard our childhood as an extensive period of our lives, though eventually it becomes a tiny fraction of our days spent on earth. 
     We played marbles every spring we remember, but in reality for how many years?  Probably only three or four, at most.  Hide and seek was a game we played "forever" but at what age did we stop playing-----eleven or twelve?  For how long did we ride our bikes aimlessly around the town, as children do, with no destination in mind, just for the sake of riding around?
     I never owned a bicycle, but when my brother got a new bike, his old one was lying around, as was another old bicycle left in our yard by a boy on our street, who had either outgrown it and abandoned it, or perhaps was kind enough to offer its use for my sister and me, who were both bikeless.
   So I have memories of riding a bike as a child, though how many times is not verifiable, and in actuality most likely much less than it would have seemed.  But among the memories we capture as reflective of our childhood, almost like looking at a snapshot of the time, I see myself riding a bike in the evening, just before sunset. 
     My father is sitting on the front porch, as he did after supper when the weather was nice.  I am alone, circling my bike  in the lot of the vacant garage next door, around the concrete remnants of the island where gas pumps once stood.  The sun is setting, colorful and beautiful, visible between the Valley Inn and the smokestacks of the James Thompson Mill, which are spewing the last smoke of the day.  Jack's (only later to become Sara's) store is open, and as customers pass by, they greet my father, calling him Charlie.  I used to wonder how so many people knew him, since to my mind, my father was at work every day, and went only to church on Sundays.  I ride as far as the parking lot of the Valley Inn before turning back to ride around the pumps again.  I see my father sitting on the porch and as I ride toward home, feeling the warmth of the sun on my back, I suddenly experience a feeling of unrest, kind of a vague ache. I think I want to go somewhere else, though I'm free to ride anywhere in the village that I wish.  I don't know what I want to happen, and nothing does.  Only that the sun finally sets, my father goes inside, and I put the bike away.