Small Worlds

Traveling to my grandmother's house, the car filled with excited anticipation. Visits with family were pleasant, but the city also held wonders from zoos and aquariums to shopping malls and museums. For a small town kid like me, these trips to the Twin Cities were precious. As the oldest of my high school friends, I was designated road trip chauffeur the second I passed my driver's test. Naturally, city lights beckoned again.

three teenagers find
their rural world grows smaller
under Milwaukee
skylines, in downtown traffic,
goofy kids believe they're grown

I wrote this Tanka Prose for the Wea’ve Written Weekly prompt #119. This week, Robbie was Poet of the Week and selected our prompt, which was as follows:

Theme: An impactful childhood memory & how it affected you at the time
Form: Any combination of prose and poetry, including, but not limited to (click for descriptions):
1. Haibun
2. Tanka prose
3. Prose combined with a free verse poem
4. Prose poetry

In the photo above, my friends and I are at the Milwaukee Public Museum on one of our first solo road trips to the city sans parents. The city was several hours from my hometown in northern Wisconsin, so it was a big deal. I have a lot of memories of being a goofy teenager and that happens to coincide with the rise of easily sharable digital photography.

I had a close knit group of friends in high school and good memories of those quirky adventures over the years. We would capture the silliest things on film and ham it up just to laugh at it with each other. We were at the cusp of a huge transition in technology, so it’s neat to look back at those memories and what was captured in disposable cameras, digital cameras, and early cell phones– what was lost or badly pixelated or deleted from photo but not memory and what we physically carried on in some form or other– and how those disjointed steps captured the enthusiasm and energy of the early aughts and long-lasting friendships. Good times. ❤️