Youth Candy bar wrappers Mountain Dew cans packs of Swisher Sweets on the floorboards as we drove down Carolina backroads in the days of our youth. You're only seventeen once. A portable radio at the beach played on a Thursday afternoon. My friends say I should act my age. What's my age again? We were skipping class because consequences skipped us. All the promises we made in the winter we'd break in the summer just like the hearts of all the shy girls we pushed into the pool. You're only eighteen once. At nineteen, fall rushed in. We gathered what belongings we hadn't burned, then split out to separate places. Some to college, some to the factor. Some to basic training, serving Uncle Sam. Survival was a joke. We'd tell it at parties and in university hallways and to bunkmates in a foreign desert. All people waiting for a punchline we never quite got right until the next summer That's when one of us who couldn't vote or legally drink didn't come back from a war. We knew then that life is lived by men far braver than we are. Men who know You're only twenty once.