It was the kind of lazy afternoon two kids who grew up in a river town live for. We had two tubes, the Delaware, and nowhere to be. 

We were laughing at the kids we used to be when he brought up a kid I didn't remember being at all. 

He remembered a detail, this thing that got said when we were teenagers, something ugly about gay people. It was the sort of thing that was said all the time in the 90s, especially by kids in a small town. Apparently, I put a stop to it, spoke up and said it wasn’t OK. I must have said some clumsy teenage version of a thing I wouldn’t have words for until years later, that love is love is love.

I don’t remember any of it. 

He does.

He's carried this memory of a small moment of safety in a town in a decade where it wasn't safe to be a gay kid.

Like too many kids in our town, he grew up and left this place for good. I left too, but I came back. 

These days, when I drive into town, there's a rainbow flag hanging from the front of one of our churches. Each time I pass it, I wonder what it would have been like to see that flag 30 years ago. 

I think about the boy who couldn't have imagined it and the girl who didn't know to hope for it.

And then I think about the kid in a car today as it drives past that church, peering out the window and seeing exactly what they need to see.