Cottonwood

I grew up on a cul-de-sac with a big park and field behind it. Fresh into the concept of being territorial, I claimed a stake on these grounds. The usual activity mostly concerned two Lincoln-Log pyramids, each the height of a two-story house, connected by a wooden sided, steel-piped set of monkey bars. The sanded grounds of its yard were bordered by square-cut, beams sequentially impaled by railroad nails the size of carrots.

Other points of interest included:

A patch of incredibly ancient cottonwood trees that would snow down thin flakes of white every spring. During the winter, a pool of frozen water around their trunks made for a dangerously fun skating rink.

The Schmidt yard supplied us with a hedge of thin stemmed shrubbery that bore perfect twigs for arrows. The Schimdts were newspaper boys and fostered an endless supply of rubber bands for home-made bows, assuming you found the perfect stick. Much of a boy's life revolves around the finding of the perfect stick.

The Creek surrounded the park in an almost-reflection of the cul-de-sac's curve. Each side of the creek was lined with ten yards of wooded area. We were cut-off from the next closest neighborhood by a raised, wooden bridge. The bridge's mouth was the only break visible from the park in this thin strip of forest. A sometimes hazardous path had been worn down on both shores of the creek. Along this path was a bowl of earth we constantly built into that served as a concealed meeting place we called The Dug-Out.

The parking lot, connected to the cul-de-sac, was defined by cast cement curbs that changed color seasonally. Come spring a fresh coat of paint would appear with an even, crayon-like density. Over the course of the summer, this thick layer would give in to the balanced trod of non-stop child stunt acts. By Fall, the wear of this acrobatic traffic would reveal past lives of pink and blue and yellow as if in rebellion to the park's newly acquired earthen tones. By winter they where forgotten until Spring's cosmetic lure drew our attention once again.

While out walking by myself one day (a budding habit that would not truly reach its peak until the summer of 2004 in Toronto, where I would leave my downtown apartment on a Saturday morning and cover ground for three or four hours before realizing I had to walk back. For some reason I'm stubbornly against taking a cab if walking is in any way possible.), I found myself unusually alone in the park. My solitude was eventually breached by a trio of older kids who climbed to the top of the pyramid that I was not occupying. Two of these strangers had no effect on me what-so-ever and the particulars of their appearance are lost to time. One of them may have been a girl.

The third member of this party, however, will remain in the forefront of my memories forever. In my recollection he is thin and shirtless with dark, shoulder-length hair. Sitting atop the tallest park structure, he unclasped three brass, U-shaped latches on what I assumed was a hard shell tennis racket case.

I had seen guitars before, but never in a comfortable or familiar environment. In the days before computers and Photoshop, pictures of things-never-seen had the ability to adopt an existence similar to actual memory. The photograph used to represent a seemingly accurate portrayal of the world outside our experiences. The reality of these flat images was unchallenged. Altered photographs did exist, but always seemed to give themselves away and never registered quite right. Harsh outlines and tonal incongruities read as inconsistent to the type of perception the genuine thing mimicked.

The result of analogue photography's former power to inform actuality was a synthetic deja vu that convinced the mind of phantom affiliations with things-never-seen. The shock of encountering a "known" object for the first time is a hypnotizing wrestling match in the mind. The referee of this melee is the self-righteous need to unconditionally trust our personal ability to take in symbolic concepts and un-symbolize them into authentic information. Pieced-together data, taken-in devotionally, competes with uncontestable, main-lined stimulus while the brain reorganizes every detail the way a jilted lover rearranges a photo album to avoid the offending individual without completely annihilating the space in history that they occupied.

In this case, the offending individual may be seen as faith in man's inventions and their ability to inform with nature's perfection. Culture thrives on the impression that the intention of its creations is salutary and motivated by a benign force.

As a result, that first encounter with a physical guitar was every Christians' dream of seeing God and validating a life-time of conviction while simultaneously wondering why he looks less like God than they imagined. The guitar seemed neutered in the park without the mass communicational devices commonly employed to elevate its status as a cultural icon. This guy was wearing sneakers instead of dragon boots, spit saliva as opposed to fire and blood and appeared less than twenty feet tall. In my child's mind this instrument was wielded only by humans who have elevated themselves to a quasi-deity status through heroic accomplishments and supernatural abilities. This blasphemer was obviously a hoaxing imposter that should be devoured by weasels and other terrible animals for impersonating something divine.

Then he played "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" and, for the second time that day, my consciousness expanded, this time to incorporate the idea that the holy power of music was mortal, achievable and within my means to harness. Before that day, I was a believer in my social role as "The Entertained", "The Fed", and "The Hungry".

I now had this childish whim to elevate my station to a higher rank. I couldn't realize then that childish whims turn into the governing mechanisms of our truest adult character.