Once In A Lifetime

I've just finished going eight rounds with my past. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to go the distance, since that's pretty much the kind of guy I am. But sometimes I wonder. Over the past week I've had the sneaking suspicion that I am waking up from a long sleep, and all that stuff I remember must have come from a dream. "This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!" Yet, the people around me seem to be on to whatever scam I'm trying to perpetuate, so I'll let it slide.
I remember a party when I was eighteen. I was being feted for my departure from my home planet of Boulder. After much anguish, tears and excitement, I was launched in to the void of Santa Fe, only to bounce back one short week later. The future that included me going to school in New Mexico had evaporated. Instead, the Foothills of Colorado held sway and there I stayed.
I remember another party, a few years later. My father turned fifty. All his friends were there. I wandered through the crowd of middle-aged revelers directing my roommates who had been enlisted to make a video record of the event. Later, after many drinks had been consumed, I was asked for the keys to my car. Having nominally completed their task as videographers, they were anxious to move onto the next chore: buying us drugs. I stayed and drank with the grownups while they wandered around in the winter night, in search of something different. Harder. Scarier. When they came back empty handed, they told me a story about how they almost bought heroin because there was no cocaine to be found. And there was a new dent in my Volkswagen's fender that no one could explain. By the next winter, we were down to just one roommate. We had a party for him when he died.
I kept waking up from that dream. When I was thirty, I lived alone. A girl who would become my wife came to work a magic spell that would release me from the spell I was under. I could finally leave. But not before there was a party. This one was on the patio of that house that had become my mother's. I turned thirty, packed up my possessions and drove west. Only to return a year later to throw another party in the meadow in front of the cabin that had become my father's. We danced. We sang. I got married.
I came back to Boulder for another party. This one was to introduce my son to the people and places where I had grown up. "These are the mountains. This is your tribe." He learned to love the thin air and the fireworks, but his home was by the bay, and he needed to get back there. He misses his place like I used to miss mine. The place where his birthday parties have been. Where we finally celebrated not one but two Super Bowl victories for the Denver Broncos.
Did I sleep through the twenty years that I've lived in California? How can this be? It seems like I was just leaving Boulder. Bon Voyage. Welcome Home, we've missed you. "Same as it ever was."