Knocking At The Gate

One of the mental distractions I use when I'm trying to fall asleep at night is memory skittering: I just randomly seize on moments from conversations in my life and move on to the next random one as fast I possibly can. I find that I can skitter over about two different memories a second when I really get going. (It's bizarre to me that this is relaxing, but there it is.)   One of the memories I tripped over last night involved a friend named Griff I had in grade school. We played on the intergalactic space fort thingy on the Villas Elementary School playground because it was an intergalactic space fort and in those space race days most every kid was seriously into intergalactic space forts.   I remembered a particular morning when we went out to recess unusually early for some reason or another. Everything was still a little damp and the last of the morning fog was still visible. He was cross that the space fort was cold and wet but we decided it was space fort fuel that had