Best Laid Plans
by Frederick Egan Castleberry
The orange glow from the east slowly crawls over the pines, dancing on the lake's glass. It's hypnotizing. Therapeutic. Magical. My suprachiasmatic nucleus (the tiny part of the brain responsible for waking you up) triggers as the lambent light hits my dilated pupils. I paddle towards it in a wooden canoe carved from a felled tree over a century ago. Its integrity still in tact, like a good man long laid to rest.
I should be on Nantucket right now. If I had things my way (of which I often insist), I would be. Sand in my hair, salt in my mouth. But I'm not. Instead, I'm in a small town outside of Providence, Rhode Island. Late trains, missed buses, sold out ferries...disguised whispers to embark on adventures unaccounted for.
It's the night before and I've stalled in Providence until tomorrow morning. I text Kiel (James Patrick). He and his lost boys will be here in about 17 minutes. We immediately declare a pizza party. All at once, we sync our watches for the 30 minute countdown and secretly hope Dominoes can't navigate the obscure winding roads (does Dominoes still guarantee delivery in 30 minutes or less? Who knows, we don't care...we just watch the clock in optimism*).
Tonight becomes a flashback to boyhood. Fire-starting, prank-pulling, firework-lighting, trespassing, and all-around general troublemaking. We hop into canoes just after midnight and paddle into the night. Our iPhone batteries exhausted, we lose all track of time, space...ourselves. It isn't until this morning as I'm paddling out that I realize even the best laid plans are at the mercy of Summer's romantic whims.
Now on to Nantucket...
*The Providence Dominoes driver did indeed later lose his job after failing to make good on Dominoes' "30 minutes or it's free" guarantee. We discovered some time later that one of the summer interns inverted one of the numbers in the address. We felt quite badly about this.
**Ok, we didn't feel badly about this because I made that up. It turns out that Dominoes hasn't promised a pie in "30 minutes or it's free" since 1993. Huh. Seems like it was only yesterday.