Born to be alive

Late august. A young man carries a pair of loudspeakers on his arms along an unmade road. They aren't heavy and the distance he has to travel is not long. They are just a tad too large to be carried along comfortably. Every few steps the man has to stop to rearrange the load. Across an empty plot another young man pokes fun at the loudspeakers carrier. The latter doesn't look pleased. He is actually quite upset, even angry. The man across the plot is joyfully eating a peach he has cut from a peach tree that grows in a little strip of garden his family owns. Eating peaches is something he often does. A party went on the night before at the garden of the house of a common friend. There was music blasting from those very same loudspeakers. In the summer of 1979 Patrick Hernandez hit the big time by telling the world the patently obvious fact that we are born to be alive. The two young men were indeed born to be very alive. Thirty years later the loudspeaker bearer finds himself directing his gaze often at the whitewashed balcony of a nearby bungalow the family of the peach eater owns. It is a reflex action. On the balcony of the bungalow he sometimes sees unfamiliar faces. His old friend is now gone, he passed away suddenly earlier this year. The loudspeaker man looks at the bungalow and remembers how as a young man he awkwardly carried a pair of loudspeakers on his arms along an unmade road while across an empty plot another young man poked fun at him while joyfully ate a peach he had just cut from a peach tree that grew in a little strip of garden his family owned.