It’s the perfect time of year, somewhere far away from here.
It actually was the perfect time, especially of that year. July. I’d just graduated from high school. My friends had started that awkward dance of preparing for a new life while pretending nothing would change between us. We didn’t know what the future held, which is true all the time, but in that exceptional moment we were aware of it.
My classmate Dave suggested we go surfing. I didn’t think I was close friends with him, but in hindsight this was very naive of me. We ate lunch together, did school projects, and talked in between classes. We usually formed two parts of an unbreakable trio with Andrew, but for some reason Andrew couldn’t make it the day we went surfing.
Dave got permission to take his dad’s Porsche 911. His parents were rich, which might be why I didn’t think we were really friends.
The surfboards were his dad’s too. Even though Dave lived in a wealthy enclave of the western Philadelphia suburbs, his dad somehow sustained a quiet passion for surfing. I think he took frequent trips to Hawaii.
I went to Dave’s house exactly once in my life, to work on a science project. Dave was obsessed with classical music, and we agreed the project should be on the physical patterns of musical scales. My contribution was coding the whole thing in HTML, with interactive musical notes on a staff showing the waveforms they created in air. The whole thing fit on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. I’d pay almost any sum today for a copy of that file.
The surfboards fit onto custom-built roof racks on the 911. I never thought until this moment about the fact that there were two. Dave’s dad must have put both of them in so he could surf with his son. What a dad.
Our destination was the world-renowned surfing Mecca known as Ocean City, NJ. On the two hour drive, we talked about college, of course. Dave was going to study music at Wheaton College. Andrew was going there too. Several of our classmates at Delaware County Christian School were. It represented good middle-of-the-road Evangelical values, respectable educational standards, a “safe” school for Christian parents to send their kids to. I had opted not to apply there, or anywhere else, driven by a zeal for my heroes of the Protestant Reformation. I wanted to be a modern-day John Calvin, or at the very least a half-decent Zwingli. For two years I’d been working at a Bible bookstore, saving my earnings to buy books about paedobaptism and scriptural exegesis. Covenant College was the only school the passed my theological purity test.
The weather was good. The water was warm enough that we didn’t need wetsuits. Dave showed me the basics since I’d never surfed before. He was still learning himself, but he could get up on the board when a wave came along, which was not very often. We lolled in the water. At lunchtime we ate Mack and Manco’s pizza. I was a little disappointed by the pizza after hearing about it for years. My family usually went to Rehoboth and ate Grotto Pizza, which is also disappointing, but in its own way.
It wasn’t too long before we gave up on surfing and walked on the boardwalk. We found a used CD shop and I bought a copy of Barenaked Ladies’s Maroon, their wan follow up to the megahit Stunt. On the car ride home I could tell the album was a flop. They’d tried to reproduce what they thought was the same formula that had made “One Week” a relentless ear worm on radios everywhere: singing really fast. But that wasn’t enough on its own. I traded the CD away that summer before I even left for college.
On a sudden urge, I played the song again yesterday while my daughters were playing in an inflatable pool in our backyard. Instantly it took me back to that day with Dave Ballam, rolling on the New Jersey Turnpike in the 911.
It’s the perfect time of day
To throw all your cares away
Put the sprinkler on the lawn
And run through with my gym shorts on
Take a drink right from the hose
And change into some drier clothes
Climb the stairs up to my room
Sleep away the afternoon
It’s like a dream you try to remember but it’s gone then you
Try to scream but it only comes out as a yawn when you
Try to see the world beyond your front door
Take your time because the way I rhyme might make you smile when you
Realize a guy my size might take a while just to
Try to figure out what all this is for
That moment, July 2001, was probably the last moment I thought I had genuine certainty what all this is for. Two months later, I watched an airplane smash into a tower right after moving into my dorm room, and I was thrown into a new adult world that was terrifying and unknown. I’m glad we can’t see the future. Sometimes that’s probably the only way to enjoy the present.