"aw"stin

Well, I'm here. Our director of photography missed his flight, so we won't be filming until tomorrow morning, but I am here.

With nothing else in particular to do, I decided not long after my arrival to take a walk. The sun was in its early setting stage, warmth radiated off the grass around me and a deeper calling to get outdoors rang from within.

I took a long stroll around the streets of this cozy, almost numbingly quiet suburb town and found myself before too long at the large outdoor track and field of a neighborhood elementary school.

At first I was slightly wary of entering. I was in Texas after all, and couldn't imagine they took too kindly to a shaggy haired twenty-something male wandering around a child's playground at dusk.

Truth be told, I wouldn't have entered at all were it not for the overwhelming sensation of fullness from my first Texas meal and the following sensation to attempt to walk it off at all costs.

When I got to the field I was surprised to see a small group of a dozen or so boys playing a game of flag football. As I got nearer I was even more surprised, and delightfully so, to see that one of the boys was in fact a little girl, pony-tailed and rough-edged, the only one on the team.

A few moms and siblings sat in the bleachers watching the casual drills while playing remote controlled trucks. It all seemed so simple. Deceptively so, I pointed out a while later to my on-screen mom. "Nothing is ever fully as it seems."

The aura of childhood is not the rose colored existence we paint it to be in later life. Growing up is hard. The lack of freedoms we so desperately wish for. The often impossible task of fully grasping who and what we really are, are not, sound like, look like, smell like, will be and will never be. The near constant pressure to make the grade week after week, test after test with the prize in question none other than that of our FUTURE.

(This, I think in particular we forget as adults, how hard it was to have this burden resting on our tiny shoulders for so very many years) Still, it looked pretty quaint.

And the sight made me both sad for the innocence lost since my own childhood and simultaneously hopeful for the childhood that will someday enter my life again. I've never been a person who enjoyed sports. But I've always seen myself as the type of Dad who would love a good game of Tee Ball.

It hurt just a little bit, seeing them there. Family. When family was still a coherent and tangible unit. Before it became defined by cities in the Northeast and universities in the Deep South.

As I walked away it dawned on me that the only contribution I would be making to this community, to these lives or to this evening was the spit I would be leaving in the fine red gravel track ahead of me.

I spit, clearing some of that Texan grease from behind my throat, and then walked on. I had watched long enough. My story was not theirs and I would never want it to be. It was time to return to the house. For this was their lives, not mine.