The old village green was a favourite hang out of ours, between the long winters and the burning suns of summer, when things were just right. We would watch the leaves tumble from the sky and dance or wage war, or something poetic like that, but really it was just something we did so we didn’t have to watch the years slipping by. Old Frank, remember, he used to smell like honey porridge and old class, he would sit by the crossing and watch the world go by and occasionally pile up twelve cars long, but not for long, not for long. He wore vermilion slippers, and you said that, shit, there was no way you could walk a mile in those. It’d be a hell of a fight, that next step. And Buster, Frank’s best bud and everybody’s best bud, with his damned flopsy ears slapping in the wind, we laughed so hard I almost fell from the tree. For the time being, we would sit in front of huge glass windows with our petite spoons, en garde! Those very small triangular buffet sandwiches, they would have been posh for anybody else but we stuffed them down with a dirty hunger and spoke with our mouths full, the audacity. I stirred my coffee into a nebula, and we said that the whole world was right here. There’s a twinkle in your eye that I can hear when you say something you really mean, you know that? Our coffees sat in their cups until a dark crusty line formed at the top, but that’s okay because we were watching leaves and laughing and gone.