It was August. The gutters were lined with crumpled beer cans, plastic bags, and the dying shades of the first discarded leaves of autumn. The two of us were walking down Franklin towards where the old Acadia used to be on Nicollet. The hard soles of his cowboy boots ticked away the final breaths of the collapsing sun, the last days of summer before class started back up again, our schedules tearing us from our daily lunch meetings and coffee breaks, disintegrating our relationship down to tales of “this guy I used to know.”
He took a long drag on his cigarette before tossing it under the parked sedan to our left.
“You were on that ladder and I came over and introduced myself. You looked down at me and smiled and then promptly fell off. Remember that? It was the summer of Marlboro lights.”
I walked towards the curb, stepping one foot down to the gutter, pinched ambers from the cigarette and stared at him wide eyed as I placed the remains of his addiction into the garbage can on the corner. He shook his head letting a single chuckle escapes from his rounded belly.
“Yeah, you remember.” He extends his arm and shuffles his hand over the top of my head quickly tossing my hair side to side. “You remember.”
His third cigarette thrown at my heels as I rounded the corner was the final farewell of that American Spirits summer. My strongest memory now being his way of classifying time periods with the brands of cigarettes he was purchasing.
It’s only now that I understand, now in my season of Basil Hayden’s.
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