Life across the street

I just noticed that familiar thump, thump, thump of a basketball hitting pavement and looked at the clock in the corner of my screen: it's 2:47 PM and school's out. I got sucked into a multi-entry archived tale on Nickerblog and lost track of time.

I love that sound of basketballs hitting the ground, the backboard, the rim, swishing through the net. I wish I had my own hoop to play at. Sometimes I think of asking to play across the street, but it seems too weird, as if I'd be interfering in some alternate universe version of my high school days. In my glimpses of the kids across the street, I see another life I could've lead here. Not really since I would've had to have been a different type of person than I am; perhaps it's just a view of other possible lives to be had on this street at the age I was when I first moved here. Lives that seem more popular and easy-going than my adolescent experiences here, but then all I see is surface: walking home from the bus, getting picked up by friends, pulling the trash barrels in, or mowing the lawn. Who am I to judge the difficulty or ease of their experiences from my tremendously slim vantage and why do I think of it at all? Just another means of reviewing my life and my choices I suppose.