Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of me in a square of light from the house I grew up in on the East side of Buffalo, New York. It is a curious thing what photographs do. How they stop time, edit a life to a fraction of a second, and then disappear, only to reappear again many years later, and in the instant of the seeing bring you back to those moments you thought you had forgotten.  On the back of the photograph, in the cursive of my mother’s hand, is written “David in golden light, 1979.” I am struck by the ordinariness of the image. I have come from the adventure that was outside. I am as usual lost in my thoughts and watching the dust particles float. I am with my friend whose hair was fire. We have caught salamanders in a cup, or potato bugs, or beetles. I have no recollection of the day of this particular photograph to which I attribute to the long languid summer days that bled from one to the other without regard to time. Mondays were Wednesdays and Fridays were Mondays in those days. So this photograph is a photograph of all of those days when we hunted snakes and put them in Folgers cans with air holes poked into the plastic lids. In the mornings after breakfast, our mother sent my brothers and me out into the neighborhood. We ran the streets. Threw rocks until we discovered kissing girls, but this was before that. This was when I went out into the world and newly discovered it. Everything was a revelation.  Each day held countless epiphanies. We jumped off of garages into pools. We ran and tripped and gashed our knees. The blood ran red and thick. We spit on it, wiped it off, and ran again. Our bodies glistening with sweat. Life and death were entwined. There was a yew bush in our yard with plump red berries that our mother told us were poisonous. We mashed them in a bowl with a stick and some mud that we had made with the garden hose. We crushed the berries into a fine paste and then the game turned, unbeknownst to me the youngest. My brothers, who smelled of gasoline, threatened me with the death berry paste until I cried. This was known as love. But here, in this photograph, I am thinking thoughts I thought I had forgotten. I am bright with the newness of discovery. I am figuring and searching, amazed with the wonder of it all. The salamanders with their flat tails. The thickness of blood. The juice of the deathberries. The ash smudged fingers of my brothers. The spokes of a bicycle wheel.  The safety of light through a window. The pop of a ball in the mitt. We were baseball players in the World Series. We were gangsters. We were explorers and scientists. We were thinkers before final thoughts. We were feral and free. Until we weren’t, until Mondays actually became Mondays. Until death became real. Until we learned time.  But for a brief moment this many years later, in the rush of what constitutes life now, through a photograph I am there again in the golden sunlight imagining the countless universes in the dust particles that float through a shaft of light from the window of my childhood home.