Eavesdropping on somebody else’s zone

Memories of childhood recalled in old age are brittle. When I write about the blonde boy and his experiences in these posts, I believe in spiritual truth even as I know full actual historical truth is beyond my reach. Too many people have died and reduced collective memory.

The blonde boy from the ravine grew to become a drummer and a guitar player; my brain recorded the growth in my muscles and bones even as my memory created a blonde boy mythology with real seeds in the soil of the past—a blue plastic uke from a carnival, a pair of 2B drum sticks, a photo of the First Impressions in the local paper. Not much to go on.

Half a mile north, up the gravel road, along the creek separating gentle hills from the valley and the gravel, a trough of clear glittering water in summer that flooded in storms; on the edge of an acre his father bought after WWII from a kind farmer for a dollar, on a flat spot between the road and the creek a young couple slipped a box of a house off a trailer, wide load, onto a lot prepared to accept a ready made building, power and well house and septic tank in place.

They made a baby boy and named him Bobby, baby Bobby badly spoiled. To their delight Bobby learned to walk, talk, eat, play, use the toilet, and sit at a desk in the wooden beamed classrooms of red brick Washington School like any other normal child in the village, happy, chubby, a little off in the head maybe.

Bobby helped the blonde boy put the finishing touches on a fort from the scavenges of a billboard sign tornado twisted from the north shoulder of the state highway down the bend on the gravel road. They chased tadpoles and frogs, skipped smooth stones on water bug pools, built rock and branch damns to reroute currents, pirated treasures from piles of junk dumped into the creek at night by shadowy villagers—arm chairs, ironing boards, paint cans, chicken wire, washing machines, a potpourri of garbage half-submerged in stopped moss water.

Bobby and the boy liked to spelunk in the earthy hideaways, wood caves, randomly appearing in the crisscrossed cleared tree logs, limbs and all, dumped from claws of giant caterpillars made right here in Aurora and Joliet, brought in to rip out tree toothpicks from ancient earth to make way for box houses to sell to people moving to the hills rendering the valley of the shadows its shape.

One Sunday night after Bobby ate supper at the blonde boy’s house and hung around to watch the Wonderful World of Disney on television, something happened that changed the world. At the time—they were around ten years old—they didn’t know it, but a bell was rung not to be unrung. Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles, they belted out “All My Lovin,” and Bobby wanted to take another look at the electric guitar the blonde boy had begged for and got for Christmas, no amplifier, just a guitar.

Bobby’s parents, in full spoil mode, ended up buying him a guitar and signing him up guitar lessons at Evelyn Brue School of Music. Over the next few years the blonde boy would watch the gravel road for Bobby’s dad’s Chevy coming back from a guitar lesson. The blonde boy would hightail it up the half mile to the box house and sit on Bobby’s porch where Bobby would go over insights from Evelyn. The blonde boy felt his eyeballs struggling in their sockets to follow the notes dipping and diving on the lines of the staff. He could read rhythm pretty well from his time with Mr. Stanley, his music teacher at school, but this kind of reading was different.

The blonde boy turned to his ears for help. While Bobby played what was written, the blonde boy watched, listened, and memorized. He never learned to read for pitch worth beans, it remains a laborious but essential process, but he built a durable library of single-note phrases stored as sounds in memory. Much later, after decades of pickin’ and grinnin’ with in-laws, outlaws, and scofflaws, the blonde boy forgot who stocked the library, and he had to grow old to understand the debt he owes Evelyn Brue.