It was the one perfect moment of my life.

The sun gleamed down hard, bright, above me. The smell of pollen from roadside plants in the air, the breath of the wind pulled back my long, care-free child hair, which my mother adored, which I grew annoyed of from constant attempts to push away from my eyes. The sun and the wind pulled me up from my seat on the Schwinn, brilliantly purple and blue, as I heard the rhythm of the Schwinn, the rhythm of my life, a gliding pulse. The back of my shirt making circles of sweat, I pulled lightly on the breaks as I approached traffic ahead. Riding up onto the sidewalk, I hopped off, kicked out the kickstand, and popped out my Sony cassette player from the back pocket of my torn Levi's, scorned at by my mother. My finger lay rested upon the plastic projected triangle pointing distantly to the right. The slightly faded silver glint of my cassette player's plastic shell was covered in my own sweat, beginning to bother me. I grabbed the bottom of my brown and red horizontally striped Guess shirt and wiped the dirty sweat off with the front side of my shirt. If it had been three summers later, the time at which I began to worry of stains and dirt, about looking nice and smelling clean, I may have been bothered by this. But, seeing as the summer sun of '98 left my forehead perspiring and aforementioned cassette player sweaty, and being the worry free child of my past I so longingly miss, I wiped the bothersome perspiration away, allowing the silver cover to shine. I pressed down on the triangle, clicking it into place, playing the beginning of track six, side one, on The Rocket Ship Tape, or as my mother called it, Bela Fleck & The Flecktones. Fitting it back into my back pocket, I kicked in the kickstand of the Schwinn, stepped back on, and rode a ribbon through the stalled traffic on Los Gatos Boulevard, on the beginning of a gloriously hot day, summer of '98.

By Calvin