captured in passing

recovered significance

	We were cutting through farmland on a back road from Chico called The Midway to avoid SR99 — a two-lane popular for accidents that passed through a speedtrap called Gridley. 

Occasionally, the farm route rice fields flooded over the roadway, but at night you didn’t know until you were already there, caught off guard. 

. . . the transformative terrain of youth . . .

On one drive, with the water suddenly up to the pickup truck doors, we kept going anyway, keeping an eye on where the ditches met the road, judging from moonlit barbed wire fence post tops. We washed along to stop at the top half of a stalled Jetta with a Chico State music dept fugitive sitting on the roof clutching an uncased cello. He hopped into the truck bed & we recovered safely to Gridley high ground. 

. . . selective partial amnesia . . .

Gridley is also where I sustained high school. Chico is a half hour north & was my teen go-to sanctuary then with a Tower Records, an arthouse theater & an army surplus/salvage store called Gates Resale that also sold well-worn bottom-shelf guitars & amps that weren’t worthy of actual music instrument stores, but good enough.  

. . . where a rural sixteen-year-old could see a new movie called Eraserhead . . .

	Additionally, Chico was a haven for typical university wild life, so, for junior year, I moved into an infamous apartment complex nicknamed The Zoo — a storied compound that housed the non-Greek-letter types. Occasionally, the complex would throw a blowout as an obverse counteract to Greek events. The property itself was traditionally hungover afterwards, commemorated with bottles, cans, & burned furniture carcasses.

During my one-year lease there, I stayed across town the weekend that The Zoo had their annual Spring bender. We watched local news that night, seeing footage of the affair just a few miles away. When we returned, we realized the breaking news we’d seen starred our smoldering couch. 

	However, one thing that somehow did survive was an experience when I first moved in, a quiet afternoon in September 1985. Walking alone through the complex on my way to the campus, I passed a sound coming from one of the apartments — someone playing a violin. For some reason, that passing moment left an unexplainably moving impression & I wrote down a line: “I heard you from a window.” 

Of all the instants that’ve been forgotten or written off over the years, that line has stayed with me, lingering like a photo — an occasionally rising, brief flash of mysterious significance — a permanent mark that resurfaces every so often, as if trying to make meaningful peace.

The moment was instrumental. I’ll play its unvoiced inspiration in the next post: the eventual slide — a 1/16/19 memo demo dabble.