Just One More Time

For some reason this winter, I’ve wanted some experiences from my past just one more time.

I’d like to have Thanksgiving dinner with my grandparents in Goessel, Kansas, circa 1975, just one more time. Mennonite sausage, fried potatoes, and random midwestern sides, nothing gourmet. They both died more than 30 years ago.

I’d like to hear whippoorwills at dusk from my old tent in the Staff Area of Camp Thunderbird. Thunderbird closed years ago. I bet the whippoorwills still call in summer, but there’s nobody around to be annoyed.

I’d like to stand on the porch of the cabin at Cimarroncito in Philmont Scout ranch during an afternoon rain storm, with my old Patagonia pile jacket on, and a cup of Swiss Miss instant cocoa one more time. The rain there is cold, but it brings up a unique smell from the ponderosa pines, and the dusty meadow that’s in front of the cabin.

I’d like to take my kids to a traveling exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science one more time. If they could be about 10, 8, 5 and 5 again, that would be perfect, so they could see something for the first time and be enthusiastic and full of questions.

I’d like to see Phamily Theatre Company’s 2015 production of Caberet one more time. Phamily being what it was, they had two Emcees, one of them profoundly deaf, both of them excellent.