By Ike Kelman
Every Weekend during the summer you’d go to the beach. It would be an hour commute.
Every time you’d cross over a blue bridge, the blue bridge. Everyone knew it, everyone is used it.
You’d see it stretching from land to land, connecting the two. One was home, the other a partially foreign land. But that bridge always stood bringing the two together.
Now you're old enough to drive, you practice on the road and highway. Ready to orient yourself. But now the repetitive drive was at your own will.
You observe the lights that stand above differently, watching for their direction. You no longer look out the window as watch the blue pillars pass by with the river and sky hidden behind. Your eyes now stay glued to the road ahead, locked out of imagination and locked onto the destination before you. The bridge is a portal, now a tool at your expense. Used with focus and devotion. Still admired on the ground below but above lays a new life. A life of which you carry your friends upon, having them escape the city behind them to a two day paradise ended by crossing the bridge.
The bridge is now a challenge of self guidance. Past the life that was lived.
But it still stands, as it did long before and it will long after. Shepherding others' journeys. With the same big blue name possessing the history of the city across the river.
As we all call it the Ben Franklin Bridge.