Of course it had to be Midge first, he always wanted to be first.

Midge, whose sister was all of last Summer’s sumptuous endings, his mother, coiffed like a cruel morning came out and banned us from heading out with him.

Midge had other ideas, he wasn’t a boy to be limited by what his mother, Gloria was her name, nothing glorious about her, fattened calves and a wastrel husband who could never remember who he was supposed to come home to.

Midge was always first with the ideas and Gloria knew it, composing songs of praise for her son while trying to stop him from destroying the world, or coming up with an idea that laid waste to decency, longing, compassion and the latest excuse for why he couldn’t do what Gloria, his poor mother who put up with it, expected him to do.
So Midge had it first, the idea that we’d all just set off, careering down the road, where Gloria, with her ankles, would never be able to find us, glimpsing the gallimaufry of all our youthful ambitions disappearing in the dust of our modern confections, to the lake, to the pond, to the reservoir, of ideas but really just of water, where Midge, who had the idea, and his proxy brother, who didn’t want to be there, his sister who did but wasn’t, and me,

would stand between earth and sky, silenced by the sight.