Inspired by conversations with two ancient friends at a reunion last year, I took off on a short but lush piece about my last two years in high school called "Class of '65," then workshopped it in a Great Smokies program led by fiction writer Vicki Lane.

Here's the way it begins:

The lane reels off the highway and spills over small hills, moving quietly through trees yellowing with fall, ending at a lit pavilion.

I pull the station wagon next to a fence and walk down a pitched slope, trying to stay on my feet. I'm nervous and a bit self-conscious. Orange and black balloons dangle from fence posts, the colors of Virginia High School. The shadows in front of me jump with energy. Under the half-light of the pavilion, hardly anyone looks old enough to be 68 ~ or whatever 68 is supposed to look like.

As I walk up, a bearded Jim Crumley bounds out to say hello and I'm glad to see him. Fifty years ago, we squeezed into his mom's kitchen and held court on the merits of Motown. We listened to Bobby "Blue" Bland and talked about the advantages of folding seats in a Rambler. We talked about shooting doves in Southwest Virginia and escape-hatching girls at Virginia Intermont, the small women's college just up the hill.

Crumley married Sherry Smith, who I kissed in the autumn of '64 at the Moonlight Drive-in on Lee Highway. We kissed after I'd hung a 5-pound metal speaker on our car window. Down front, the giant screen flickered and pulsed. Engines cranked and shut off. Someone drifted by, at the edge of a kiss, on the way to the popcorn hut.

I'm thinking about Sherry and, from nowhere, she's next to me, talking about my parents, and our friends' parents, about her mom who's still alive. She uses nicknames I hadn't thought of in years.

Big Jay for my dad. Rooni for Frank Goodpasture's mom. Big Frank for Frank's dad. Animated and smiling, she talks about Big Jay building a fire and telling labyrinthine tales to kids in the neighborhood.

"Yeah," I say, "I can see that. He was a kick-ass great storyteller."

I feel like I'm standing in a doorway. On the other side it's 1965 and we're all half a century younger. Kennedy is dead, Johnson is waging war on poverty, a deadly conflict unspools somewhere green and thick and wet, the Beatles have landed, and that fall we could actually win the game against Tennessee High, the equivalent to Haley's Comet crashing into South Holston Lake.