Growing up in the quiet, rural reaches of a Third World Caribbean island, I always thought that a car was one of the most extravagant things one could own. We weren't the wealthiest of families, and to own a car meant you were someone important, someone special. When television reached us in the seventies--and more specifically colour and American television later on--I learned that American kids got cars as soon as they were old enough to drive. It was a rite of passage as it were, as certain as getting one's driving licence, as guaranteed as adolescence angst, as unambiguous a fact as the sun rising every day to the rooster crowing in the neighbour's yard.

When I started attending high school in the town some forty-five minutes away, there were a handful of students who drove cars, perhaps three or four. They were the elite, the wealthy among us, sons of politicians and lawyers, whose generous parents could afford them that unthinkable luxury. I rode in the backseat of one of these cars once, but by and large I didn't cross paths too much with that crowd. I was, after all a country boy, not wealthy like them; not the son of a doctor or lawyer, but rather of a simple grocer from the rural backcountry. I was, as they let me know all too often, "from the bush."

The summer I turned sixteen or seventeen--I forget how old now--I got my driver's licence and pocketed it away with the rest of my valuables. I would pull it out of my bedroom drawer every once in a while and smile proudly at it, but I would never carry it around with me. After all, I had no real reason to ever use it. The family car, an inexpensive, second-hand station wagon, was too valuable for me to drive, and there was not even the remotest of possibilities that I could ever own a car. That was for the wealthy kids in town and for the Americans. Ah, the Americans.

When I came to America for college the very next year, my understanding that all Americans owned cars as soon as they could drive was confirmed. Everyone talked about their cars back home, about the ones they had and about the ones they wished they could afford. It didn't matter if it was a brand new car or a third-hand jalopy from Great-Aunt Maude, they all had cars. Me with my bare dorm walls, with my single bedsheet and nothing but a spring jacket to take me through the northeast winters, I never dared dream about owning a car. That was for the wealthy, not me. I relegated those thoughts to the land of make-believe and didn't entertain the idea of car ownership again for the next decade.

It was only when I turned thirty that I started thinking again about cars. My adolescence long gone, my twenties just finished, I was earning money and dared begin dreaming about finally owning a car. Something about the prospect of owning one of these previously unattainable possessions excited and frightened me terribly. I waffled back and forth, trying to convince myself that it wasn't a big deal, that it was just a car, that lots of people my age already owned not one car but had gone through dozens. The truth is I was terrified. Terrified but determined. I began searching.

It was earlier in February of this year when Greg and I were in Key West that Greg saw a small, strange-looking Toyota he'd never before seen. He ran back to get me and soon we were staring at the strange vehicle parked so innocuously under the shade of overhanging bougainvillea, shining and sparkling new under the early-morning tropical sun. We made mental notes and talked excitedly about it on the way back to New York. This would be my new car.

When we got back home, we began immediately searching for it. We read as much as we could about it and visited several dealerships only to discover that there was an eight-to-twelve month backlog of orders. I was crushed. I called around a few dealerships around the city, but it seemed true: some dealers weren't even taking any more orders. Then I called the dealership here in southern Vermont. True, there was still a six-month wait, but it was better than the others in the city. I placed an order and held my breath.

The months went by and I became more and more anxious. The dealership called me every couple of weeks. No news. I began calling them. Still no news. Then they called me last Monday. My car had finally arrived.

I took the bus up from New York Friday, and met Greg here in Vermont. I was scheduled to pick up the car the following day at noon. Exhausted though I was from the long week at work and the even more tiring bus ride north, I didn't sleep well that night, and I woke up at seven yesterday morning, bright-eyed and nervous. It was my big day.

***

It's strange now looking out the window and seeing this car there that's mine. It's an emotional event for me, this peculiar rite of first car ownership. It represents so many things, a milestone of sorts in my journey to true adulthood and self-sufficiency, a reconciliation with and separation from my childhood, though now at thirty-two I am as far from my childhood as I have ever been. This one last, singularly unattainable possession was one of the few vestiges from my youth that I can now leave behind. Finally, I own a car.

***

I woke up again this morning early and before Greg, and tiptoed outside alone just to look at it. I sat there in the early morning air, a blanket around my shoulders, just watching and watching and watching as I felt a chill unrelated to the weather run down my spine. It's perhaps silly to get so caught up with something so material as a car, but I am a bit overcome with emotion as I look at her right now. The full impact of this rite of passage, though so late in my life, is only just now hitting me.

She's so beautiful.

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Heads, go out with the straight colleague boys. Tails, go out with the gay blogger boys.

Gay blogger boys win.

Matt, Bob, Byrne, Atticus, Steven, Michael, Rob, Charlie, Nicole, Wayne, Tommy, Henry, Marco, Wisconsin Steven.

Sometime around 3am, Charlie left Bob and me the last ones standing, hazy and just a bit wobbly at the intersection of Somewhere and Somewhere Else.

Yep, you guessed it. Another Thursday night at Barrage.

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I woke up before my alarm went off this morning, some time a bit before six. Jesus, unassisted wakeup before six o'clock. Somebody shoot me. Terrified of oversleeping as I was, I decided against crawling back into bed and instead opted for the slow-morning prep routine. When I got out of the shower at seven-fifteen, the phone was ringing. Oh, I thought. It must be Greg with my wake-up call. See, Greg's been in Boston on business for the past few days, and besides, who would be calling me at seven-fifteen in the morning? I ran out of the shower, naked and dripping wet, my towel hanging loosely around my waist. I pushed the speakerphone button. "Morning, honey," I sang.

"Patrick?" Awkward pause. "The two block FX trades in the global accounts that we had problems booking the forward leg and not the spot leg from euro to US dollar instead of Aussie dollar you remember the trades that were done last month well there's an issue with overstatement and subsequent year-end distributions and everything must be AUD hedged well except for the 3% NAV allowed net currency exposure well there's a problem."

You could hear the water dripping off my body in the silence that followed.

As you can guess, it wasn't Greg. It was my boss. Not my junior boss. My senior boss. My senior Management Committee Chief Officer Of This Chief Officer Of That Head Of Two Global Departments I Can Fire You If You Breathe The Wrong Way boss. And I had just addressed him as "honey."

Christ, I need a drink.

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Try to pronounce Pieto's name and he'll have you know it's not really his name. He'll engage you and grin at you and tell you that it's sorta kinda his name, that it's only part of his name, that it's not his name at all. He'll wave his hands about as he corrects you, watching in the rear view mirror with something akin to curious amusement as you fumble for your wallet. That's what I learned this morning as Pieto's cab dropped me home after a few drinks out with Michael and Rob.

Michael and Rob think I'm a bad influence. Michael called me "kiddo" and Rob thinks I'm Satan. I don't know why, we had such a pleasant dinner yesterday evening. Perhaps it's because we had a few after-dinner drinks at Charlie's bar where Charlie told us about a pre-work gym incident. (The incident's not bloggable, he had said. He didn't want us to think less of him. On the contrary, Charlie, we now think more of you.) Perhaps it's because Rob left Michael and me alone with explicit instructions to not get ourselves into trouble, but that's exactly what we did, hopping over to the next bar and chattering away with drunken abandon with the guy from Brazil, the guy from Guyana, the guy from El Salvador, the guy from England. The guy from El Salvador tried to pick me up after Michael and I said goodbye and just as I was about to hop into Pieto's cab.

Pieto's cab. If you ever get into Pieto's cab, just remember that Pieto isn't driving the car. You can call him Pieto and you can tell him that Pieto is what's printed on his identification, but he'll have you know it's not really his name. He'll wave his hands and laugh and smile, and he'll tell you about a missing R. He'll have you know his name is Pietro.

And then again, at 2:30 in the morning, who has the wherewithal to argue? Bad influence, indeed.

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It's overcast in southern Vermont today. The sun, brilliant and self-assured at the beginning of the weekend, lies hidden now behind uncertain clouds, little more than an obscure idea in the expanse of sky overhead. To the southeast, the echo of distant thunder rumbles melancholic across the New England landscape. The air is cool around me.

In the short few minutes since I've begun writing this entry, the rumbling has traveled northward and overhead, bringing with it the heavy raindrops of a quickening storm. I love a good summer thunderstorm. I love the suddenness of its arrival, I love the abruptness of its departure, I love the insistent drum-drum-drumming of a hundred thousand raindrops falling around me, drowning everything out but my most personal of thoughts. It's one of the things I miss most about the summers, these sudden thunderstorms.

The cacophony of birds chirping and calling out to one another this morning has quietened considerably now in the rain, and the chipmunks scampering about in the underbrush have all disappeared into the woodpile. Rain does that to the wildlife around here. But for the renegade bluejay darting across the open sky, the animals all seem to sit still, quiet and sheltering in the canopy of the pines.

Now as I'm finishing this entry, the skies are clearing again. As I write, the thunder is moving on, the darkness lifting, the birds resuming their chatter. And there, in that shortest of moments, as suddenly as it arrived and without fanfare or apology, the rains of my summer thunderstorm are quickly and quietly gone.

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Yesterday evening, midtown west, Matt says the bar owner has just cruised me on the street. I don't see it, and I'm not sure if I believe him. Silly Matt, he kids me so.

I stay out with the boys, I have a few drinks, I have a few laughs, I have a few hugs. I crawl into bed at one thirty, exhausted.

This morning I wake at six to the tiniest bit of sunlight filtering filtering filtering through space and through the atmosphere and through the trees and through the horizontal slats in the window blinds, dancing onto my eyelid closed and resting. Wake up, it says. I am the sunrise.

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The city is steeped in grey today. At the office, the barely audible hum of quiet activity sits muffled at the periphery of my hearing, hazy and nebulous and nibbling gently at my ear. Outside, the skies hang overcast with the uniform melancholy of a midtown subdued. The rains reached us last night.

I'm not in the mood to do any work today. Everyone here seems to echo that sentiment, and save the occasional telephone ringing down the hall, the floor is eerily quiet. The cool, wet weather outside seems to have tempered the most garrulous of spirits, pacified the most enthusiastic among us, thrown a blanket of calm as it were over midtown Manhattan.

Across the way, Bob Marley wails softly into the early afternoon air.

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The cellphone vibrated gently against my leg. It was 4:30 in the morning, and I was in the back of a cab on my way home, deliriously exhausted after a night out on the town and struggling to stay awake. I looked at the cellphone and then at Steven passed out and slumped into a tired pile to my left. The cellphone didn't belong to either of us.

I answered it. "Hello?"

The caller ID indicated that Manoj was calling. "Who is this?" Manoj said.

"This is Patrick."

"Can I speak with Kimberly?"

"Kimberly left her phone in the back of a cab," I tried to explain. But even in my inebriated haze, I could tell that explaining how I ended up with Kimberly's phone would be a difficult task. Manoj was easily far more intoxicated than I was.

"Well can I speak to Allison?"

"Allison's not here either," I said. Manoj clearly wasn't getting it.

"Well tell Alison I said I'm really sorry for tonight and that she should call me back."

"Okay, I'll let her know."

I hung up and flopped back into the seat, falling immediately back into my semiconscious haze and watching out the open window the early morning skies brighten slowly to the east. Steven's stop was coming up soon and I had to wake him.

***

We met up Saturday night at the roof deck of the local leather bar, the Eagle. I'd never been to the Eagle before, and I was a bit apprehensive that I'd not exactly fit the demographic that they were targeting: big, buff daddies with bulging biceps and leather harnesses across hairy chests. But Bob, Steven, Glenn, Derrick, Charlie, Atticus, Dave and Erik were magnificent company and soon enough I forgot my initial fears. We even met and chatted with Jonno, granddaddy blogger and internet personality extraordinaire. Jonno politely declined the beer I offered him.

The next seven hours were a blur of beers and bears, hugging and holding, touching and tickling, grasping and groping, and taking calculated and paired trips to the bathrooms to investigate the goings-on there. It was a wonderful night as nights go, a night that I certainly needed after the past week at work.

***

I woke up this morning at nine to the sound of the foreign cellphone vibrating urgently on the bookshelf nearby. I ignored it and fell back fast asleep.

***

It was sometime around eleven before I finally crawled out of bed ready to reemerge into the real world. I took the cellphone off the bookshelf and began flipping through the text message entries, trying to see if I could figure out how to get it back to its owner before the battery died.

I learned that the owner spent a night on the town, hopping from bar to club to bar for a friend's birthday, finally leaving for home around 1:30 in the morning. One entry read, "We are looking for future husbands tonight."

***

I finally managed to get hold of an overly enthusiastic and bubbly Kimberly later in the day. Kimberly was ecstatic to learn that someone had found her phone, and was eager to meet me to reclaim it. When I eventually met her, we chatted for a while and she giggled as she handed me a bag with two boxes of cookies. On the outside of the bag, there was a handmade sign decorated with stars and stickers. And on the sign, written in the girliest of handwritings: Cookies for doing a "Good Thing"! Thank you! Kimberly. Below her name, a smiley face.

Kimberly lingered a little while, saying goodbye and then turning around to tell me where she and her friends had gone last night and what they had done and where they had gone subsequent to that. I didn't have the heart to tell her I already knew everything from her text messages. Then she said goodbye again, and then turned around to face me once more. "This is a nice place," she said, looking around and gesticulating. "I've never been over here before." The way she kept lingering about the lobby, I had an inkling that Kimberly hadn't found a future husband the previous night.

"Yes it is," I said. I looked at her and smiled. Kimberly was attractive and bubbly and cute and all, but I was taken. And then there was the thing about her being a girl and all. "Goodnight, Kimberly," I said, as I waved her on. I smiled again. "Goodnight, Kimberly. And good luck."

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The ninth wonder of the world is an ancient, dilapidated blue bus off Route 5 in southern Vermont, the words "Curtis' BBQ" emblazoned boldly on a large colourful sign nearby, the proclamation "Ninth Wonder of the World" scrawled neatly below in smaller, suspiciously understated fashion.

We sat there at nine o'clock this evening, Greg, my nephew Chris and me, munching on ribs, chicken, baked beans and corn on the cob. It was the fourth of July, and we were simply doing what was required of us today: the requisite meal that is undeniably and quintessentially Fourth. The three of us had just returned from a day of canoeing and to say we were hungry would be an understatement. We were famished.

We spent the day in central Vermont, paddling the twelve mile stretch of the White River from Bethel to Sharon, switching paddlers and taking turns driving the chase car along river-hugging Route 107. Today's river was different from yesterday's. No dragonflies, no damselflies, no giant birds hunting lazily for fish in the shade of the overhanging trees. Instead, today's river was open and unshaded, few trout competing with the plentiful crawfish darting back and forth under the clear, green water. Most different, however, was the pace of today's trip. While yesterday was more of an idyllic floating downstream, today's was a strenuous few hours of ferocious paddling, future aching arms and shoulders and backs be damned.

We were certainly exhausted by the time we began driving the sixty or so odd miles back south, but our exhaustion was second to my hunger. We got to Curtis' old blue bus just before he closed at nine and in short order we were sitting outdoors and wolfing down the obscenely large portions of everything on our plates.

It is now ten o'clock and we are sitting with cups of hot peppermint tea, comatose and impressively stuffed, the late dinner sitting comfortably in our distended stomachs. Outside, the faint pop-pop-pop of a few fireworks echo through the valley and in the chilly night air. Canoeing and driving and splashing and gorging: our bodies lie now uncooperative and indolent, our minds ready to drift off at a moment's notice.

It's been a wonderful Fourth of July.

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We crossed the border into New Hampshire around noon today, heading east past Keene on Routes 9 and 101 until we came to Peterborough. A little north of there, somewhere near the Sheiling Forest, we parked the chase car near a tired old footbridge ancient and rusting in the midday sun, and continued north on Route 202, chasing the Contoocook upriver until we found a good spot to put in our canoe.

We stayed in the river for the next two hours, alternating between a lazy paddling and a lazy floating, both of us lost in thought and marveling at the slow-moving scenery. Up ahead, a giant egret fished for trout.

There is something to be said about floating down a river on a summer day as perfect as today. The water not too cold, the air not too humid, the skies the perfect shade of blue. We watched the damselflies as we floated by, green and blue and yellow and purple and all the colours of the rainbow, each one curious as the next, each as beautiful as the other. To the right, the rat-tat-tat of a busy woodpecker; to the left, a school of trout racing us downstream. All around us cool, clear water.

Ah, canoeing down the river: just about as perfect and as complete as laziness can possibly be.

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We left New York for Vermont this morning, driving north up the Merritt as we always do, watching the traffic dissipate the farther we drove and taking along with it the stresses and tensions of the city. Somewhere along the way, right before New Haven I think, we happened upon a swarm of listless raindrops. We drove right through the swarm, and the raindrops flew straight at us, their tiny translucent bodies splattering effortlessly and without fanfare against the car's apathetic windshield. Whiff-whaff, whiff-whaff, they went. They left behind nothing as they died, nothing but beautiful patterns that quickly disappeared, too fleeting for anyone to notice, and too short-lived for us to talk about as we drove on and on.

***

Along the way, we stopped at a little shop in Keene, New Hampshire to pick up our new canoe. It's a handsome canoe, a burgundy sixteen-footer Wenonah that we've been waiting for since May to come in. The shop called us last week. The shop called us to let us know the canoe had come in, and we've been excited all week. We couldn't help grinning as we drove up to the little shop and then around to the back where all the canoes sat glistening in the late afternoon sun. Greg ran excitedly up to one and pointed. "This is ours," he said, grinning proudly and running his hand across the side. It looked just like the picture in the catalog, stately and adventurous and beautiful indeed. We named her Cricket. Cricket Canoe.

***

The river was full of dragonflies and damselflies and pond skimmers as we paddled out this evening. We paddled for a while, around and back, towards the far bank with the tall reeds and then back again, watching the sun set behind moody clouds in the distance. A tiny green damselfly named Mary landed on my elbow, and I stopped paddling and sat still, holding my breath and watching as the pair of iridescent eyes regarded me.

"What are you doing?" she asked. "What are you doing on my river?"

"We are paddling our canoe," I said.

"But the light is fading and soon it will be dark," she said. "It will be much better when the sun is high in the sky and the light is bright enough to see."

I kept still. "We have enough light to see. Soon we will head back to shore," I said. "It is our very first canoe, and she is new today. We wanted to take her for a quick ride. Her name is Cricket."

"Cricket Canoe is beautiful," Mary the Damselfly said. "I shall leave you now." And with that she turned around and flew away, disappearing into the masses of others like her and the cool evening sky.

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