Where Is The Little Tricycle?

Where is the little tricycle, the one that I would ride on, making laps unceasingly as my grandfather encouraged what I imagined was my fierce grownup athleticism while my newly minted self-esteem ballooned? My vigor knew no bounds and no conception of weariness troubled my supposedly endless days of play.  And what of the soft corduroy cap upon my dirty-blonde head, a black and white one with ear flaps and perceived as one worn by a motorcycle policeman?  How about the wooden milkbox, the one our family kept just outside and beside the screen door of the front door of our house?  My little tricycle would skirt it as I furiously pedaled on the vehicle in the circular route designed by Grandpa's theatrically inclined mind. No doubt he fancied himself the master choreographer of this tiny one "man" palio that his beloved grandchild could not fail to triumph in, immune to the effects of its dizzying demands for relentless rotations because of youth's insuperable vivacity. The then fairly fresh concrete of five sumer's past that covered the space between our modest attached brick house and the public sidewalk and upon which my tiny rubber tires tread: where is it? It's still there, but darkened and eroded, silently telling of so many winters, springs, summers and falls that have pounded it with impunity. Well, these objects, even if magically stored away in an attic or carelessly stashed somewhere, dry and dark, are really no more, if the spark of life given to them by their now profoundly changed human owners or borrowers are gone. Grandpa's voice, whether the happy, hortatory one on that long ago July afternoon or the one gurgling its last utterances in a mishmash of memories, is long stilled. My joyous shrieks of affirmation while immersed in the very serious business of fun are gone too, of course. What is not gone are later, other tricycles, other cries of the juvenile gaiety of their owners, other grizzled throats of encouraging shouts of other summers owned or borrowed by other lovers of life. They're not gone, because they never were.