every year contains days, but also

Every day contains years,
like how yesterday was briefly
1985 and Jenessa's dad was right there,
his glasses and strawberry blonde
mustache and crew socks,
groaning "Ness" about something she said.

What she said as we stood in the fog
watching our children climb rocks forty years later—
my god—is that he was okay for a while after treatment,
and then he wasn't, but he refused to talk about it.

It's almost next year now. This morning
at the kids' museum, I watched my toddler climb
a contraption made of fiberglass and fisherman's nets,
which dredged up from the seafloor another museum—
The Museum of Memory is always open, always dusty—
in which my older child pined to ride The Red Bikes
on the mini track outside. He was the right size
for the low yellow four-wheelers, but the red tricycles
had the candy apple sheen of the future.

(The Museum of the Future only comes in two flavors,
shiny and apocalypse, and sometimes it is closed for repairs.)

You probably saw where this was going: Now 
my older child is too big for The Red Bikes,
too big for the kids' museum. 

My friend from college went on a date with my friend
from my old job that used to be my new job.
I wanted to email the job friend and say,
Sometimes it is 1997 and I am standing in a gray cubicle
and he is talking about Streisand or Scorsese or Swingers, 
wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase. I am twenty
and have just discovered culture and he is part of it.
He likes thick women and smart women and maybe if I'd been straight—
But I don't because that would be weird
and mostly we keep in touch on LinkedIn.