The Best Life

It starts out on the wrong foot.

I dash out the door, already late for an 8:30 pm reservation, driving like mad, imagining them ordering without me, giving up my place setting and my chair, obliterating any sign that I was ever invited.

Running in at 8:50, I learn that yes, Steve has a table for five at 8:30 pm and no, I am the first to arrive, so sir, you can wait over there in the lounge for the rest of your table to arrive.

Oookay. Check the Blackberry; did Steve cancel the dinner? No emails. Should I call Steve? Calm down. Better wait a few minutes. Be cool. So I stand there, wondering where everyone is, watching other people eat and drink, hoping I don’t look like a stood-up date, then realizing I do, then trying to disappear.

Ten minutes later, the maître d’ sends Scott my way. “I can’t believe no one’s here yet,” he says. Um, I’m here, I think as I shrug and smile.

He has two bottles of wine under his arm. He holds one up to my eyes. I can’t read the label, knowing little French and nothing about wine, so I nod my head appreciatively and hope he interprets that as expertise. “Only the best for the wine club,” he says.

Wine club?

And that’s when Mike and Howard walk in, each bearing two bottles of wine. Then Steve and his two bottles of wine.

Following them to the table, I’m searching my mind, trying to remember: Did Steve say anything about wine? He’d said, “A group of us are getting together next week at this new restaurant. Want to come?”

Nothing about wine.

My instinct had been to say no, to invent a conflict and express regret, but these days I’m working hard to rebut my instincts, convinced they’re all wrong. These guys all live in Shady Glen, they’re my neighbors, I’ve met them over the years, but I’ve never spent any kidless time with them, so hey, this is a chance to crawl out from under my rock, give the social life the old college try, at least for a night, so I said yes.

“Are they decanting your wine?” Mike’s looking at me.

“No, I didn’t know this was a wine club, so I didn’t bring any wine.” Lame, but true. “Do you want me to order some? I can do that.” At least I offered.

“I think we have enough,” Mike says. Eight bottles for five men.

They don’t look too disappointed, probably relieved that at least I didn’t bring Two Buck Chuck. This is a fast crowd. Much faster than me.

The first bottle open, Mike proposes a toast to Scott. A retirement toast. Scott just sold his last building, closed his office down, packed it in for good, or at least until real estate prices return to earth.

Scott is 45.

Scott tells us he and his wife leave for France next week, “just to wander around,” he says, “no fixed plans,” although they’re flying in their decorator for a few weeks, hoping to find some good antiques for the house. “And our new wine cellar needs some real authentic racks,” he says.

“Unlike your wife’s.” Mike is grinning.

“Prick,” Scott is grinning too.

“Scott, you have the best life. I hate you. Can I shake your hand?” Mike is holding out his hand.

Scott slaps it. “Yeah, I’ve got it good,” he says, “but last time we were in France, we traveled with this other couple we know from the school. The guy’s a money manager or a trader, something like that, he made $12 million last year. And that’s mostly salary and a guaranteed bonus, so he stands to make that kind of money every year just for showing up to work. Can you imagine that? I sell a building, I might make half that, but that’s it for me, no more where that came from. It’s just a one-time thing. And if I play it wrong, I can lose money. This guy, he just shows up for work, it’s like they sell a bunch of buildings for him. Year after year.”

“Yeah,” Howard says, “but does he have a boss?”

“Sort of, I guess,” says Scott, “he doesn’t own the company, and they won’t give him equity, so they have to pay him tons of cash to keep him.”

“That is some serious money,” Howard says, “but he can lose it if the owner fires him. Or if the markets go down in a recession. You should see my brother-in-law. That guy has the best life. He and his partner make sex toys. Talk about a recession-proof business – do people ever stop playing with themselves? They make them in China for like ten cents each, then wholesale them for $5.00 to stores that sell them for $10.00. It’s all pure profit. And the best part of it is, his partner is like this sex toy design genius, invents all sorts of innovative dildos and stuff like that, so their sales keep growing and all my brother-in-law has to do is visit the factories a couple times each year and count the money as it rolls in. I’ll bet they split $8 million last year. Not as much as your friend, Scott, but that’s still a ton of money, they’re their own bosses, and, shit, they sell sex toys for a living. How great is that?”

Steve’s laughing. “Tell them about the sword fight.”

“So his kid – my nephew – he’s eight years old and having a play date and the friend’s mom comes over to pick him up and what’re they doing, they’re having a sword fight in the backyard. With dildos! They’re whacking each other in the head with some Long Dongs they found in the garage. Man, was she pissed.”

“And now he’s a pariah.”

“Sort of. People avoid them, but they also bug him for free samples.”

“Well,” Steve leans back, “that is a great life, but I don’t think it’s the best life, what with the stigma and all that. Talk about the best life – you guys all know Marco, right?”

“Gray Ferrari?”

“Right, he lives up my street, but you never see him. You know where he is? Racing cars. He follows the circuit around the world, spends half the year in Europe, this week he’s in Africa. And get this, his wife totally supports him. She owns this company, has a ton of money, so she buys him cars, pays all his bills, charters him a jet, lets him wander the world, do whatever he wants. A total free pass.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Two words: Underwear model. Need I say more?”

“No shit?”

“No shit. He used to be an underwear model. They’ve got posters hanging in his house. I’ve seen them. Let me tell you, he’s the real deal – great genes. And I’ve been out with him. Women throw themselves at him. It’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it. They go wild. The looks, the money, the race cars, the aura of bad boy danger – it’s a potent combination. Catnip for the ladies. All his life, this guy’s been the ultimate babe magnet, everywhere he goes. Can you imagine that?”

“Hell, even his wife’s a babe.”

“And rich. And get this, while he’s jetting around the world, racing his cars, he gets to do whatever he wants, if you know what I mean.”

“She’s okay with that?”

“I don’t know, but he doesn’t care. She built the business, but he still gets half. Community property. The ultimate ace in the hole. So he pretty much does whatever he wants, totally lives the life, and if it doesn’t work out, he’s still set for life.”

Howard lifts his glass. “You win. Marco has the best life. And now I’m depressed. Pass the wine.”

By now they’re well into the wine, wine I’ve barely sipped out of guilt at not having contributed any, and I ease my Blackberry out my pocket, checking the time, wondering how long I must sit here before crawling back under my rock.

Trash War

“Hey Bill, looking good. Retirement treating you well?”

“Very well, my friend,” he said, shaking my hand as we sat down to lunch. “I’m glad you could get away. Things aren’t too crazy at the office?”

“Crazy? It’s normal crazy, you know, the usual crisis mode. Same old same old. Hasn’t changed a bit since you ditched us for the peaceful life.”

“Peaceful? I’m not too sure.”

“Oh?”

“Well, it’s funny how quickly things change when you retire. One day you’re making million dollar decisions, the next day your biggest decision is where to eat lunch.”

“Well, this looks like a nice place. You’re doing a great job.”

“Thanks, smart-ass. I mean, it really changes your perspective, this being home all the time, no job, answering only to yourself. It shrinks your world.”

“Is there no peace in your shrunken world?”

“You haven’t heard about the trash war.”

“Trash war?”

“Well, my gardener comes on Wednesday, trash day is Thursday, so when the gardener’s done he takes the cans out to the curb for me, leaves them out there overnight. He’s done this for years. Anyways, now that I’m home all the time, I generate more trash, and I hate leaving it in the house so on Thursday morning, before the trash guys come, I do a sweep of the house and fill another bag. So, one day I walk out to the curb with my bag and open the lid of my trash can and what do you think I saw?”

“Body parts?”

“No, trash bags. Someone else’s trash bags. In my trash cans. Stuffed so full there’s no room for my trash bag.”

“A neighbor?”

“That what I thought. Maybe a neighbor had a particularly heavy trash week and needed to borrow some of my capacity. The city only give us three cans, one for trash, one for recycling, one for yard clippings, and it won’t take anything that doesn’t fit in the cans. You have to pay extra if you need more trash cans. A lot. So it would’ve been nice to ask first, but I figure let it go, it’s understandable, and I’ll be spending a lot of time on this street with these people, so let’s preserve the peace.”

“After a career in the trenches, you’ve sure earned a little peace.”

“So, anyways, the next week there’s even more bags. I’m starting to think this is an every-week thing, they’ve probably done it for years, but I never noticed it when I was working. Too busy to take the trash out mid-week. So I’m standing there at my trash can holding my trash bag, and there’s no room because someone else is hogging my capacity, and I’m thinking this is ridiculous, I’m getting really pissed off, so I start taking the bags out, gotta make room for my bag, why do I have to do this. Then I get an idea.”

“Uh oh.”

“I open a bag, sift through it, looking for something with a name or an address on it. The first bag’s got nothing but kitchen trash, coffee grounds and banana peels and that sort of thing, so I pull out another and it’s filled with diapers.”

“Ouch!”

“Unbelievable stench. I didn’t bother looking through it. I pulled out another bag and bingo! there it was, a bunch of magazines with address labels.”

“In your trash can?”

“Yeah, they didn’t even bother to recycle them, just stuffed them in a trash bag.”

“Bastards.”

“Exactly. So it’s the yuppies across the street.”

“The ones you hate?”

“The ones I hate. The ones whose dog shits on my lawn, the ones whose kid broke my sprinkler and denied it. And then there’s the parties, these big noisy parties they’re always throwing, cars everywhere, clogging up the street.”

“And they never invite you. Model neighbors.”

“I wouldn’t go if they did. Model assholes. Anyways, I pull out the rest of the bags, pick them all up, and walk across the street. Time for a showdown.”

“Was it high noon?”

“Night. I walk up to their porch, drop the bags, and ring the bell. By now I’ve cooled down a little. I’m thinking I’ll just say ask me before stuffing your trash into my cans. Nice and neighborly.”

“And maybe borrow a cup of sugar?”

“Right. No one answered. Before I rang the bell, I could hear them inside. Their lights were on, where else are they gonna be on a Wednesday night, but no one answers the door. I ring the bell a few times, knock loudly, nothing. Silence. I’m sure they’re there. I wait around for a few more minutes, then leave the bags and head home.”

“Message delivered.”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you? A week goes by, I don’t see them, and I’m thinking they got the message, but let’s not let this happen again, so I do some early spring cleaning, enough to fill up the trash can and the recycling can so there’s no room for their stuff.”

“The best offense is a good defense.”

“I checked on Thursday morning, no new bags, so I figured everything was okay until that afternoon, I’m taking my cans in, and I notice the yard bin is still full, and there’s this note from the city telling me I mixed regular trash with yard clippings, and I open the lid and it’s stuffed full of trash bags. Their trash bags.”

“No!”

“This time there’s nothing to identify them, no names or addresses, but a lot of shredded paper. I know it’s them.”

“Of course it is.”

“So again I take the bags over to their house, again I ring the bell and knock, and again there’s no response, so again I leave the bags and I’m thinking this is getting old.”

“So what did you do?”

“I considered calling the police, but what would I say? And talk about escalation. I’d make an enemy for life. So instead I kept an eye out for them that week, figuring we need to talk it out, nip it in the bud before one of us does something he regrets. But they never come outside, their kids no longer play in the front yard, they keep their shades drawn, and I only see their cars driving in and out of the garage, never see them in person.”

“They’re avoiding you?”

“You think? Anyways, the next week I’m ready. I fill all three of my cans so they’re overflowing, no way they can stuff any more trash in there, and I keep watch. I can see my curb from my home office, so I sat there for hours Wednesday night, watching and waiting.”

“Staking out your own trash.”

“Surveillance is really hard work. You just sit there and nothing happens. I tried to stay awake, but I kept nodding off, finally falling asleep sometime after 1:00.”

“You slept in a chair?”

“It’s really comfortable. I wake up early, the first thing I do is look out the window, and there’s trash everywhere. My cans are knocked over, and I’m thinking those crafty yuppie bastards, they made it look like a dog or a raccoon got into it. But I know they did it.”

“It’s escalating.”

“Rapidly. By now I’m shaking with rage, I want to kill these bastards, but I know I need to step back, take stock, figure out what to do. I want this to end. I don’t want to sit up another night. I don’t want to pick my trash up off the street again. I don’t want my trash to be the most important part of my life. How sad is that? So I decide to compromise. I tell my gardener not to take the cans to the curb, I’ll take them out myself Thursday morning. It’s annoying to have to do this, but there’s a malicious nut across the street and I’m in my twilight years and I really don’t want to fritter them away them dealing with trash.”

“Life’s too short.”

“Especially mine. So the next week, Thursday morning, I’m wheeling my cans out the curb, and I notice the first one’s really heavy, and I open the lid and it stinks to high heaven. Diapers and dog shit and rotten eggs and there’s a million flies. They must’ve snuck into my side yard that night and filled my cans.”

“Oh my god, what did you do?”

“I flipped out, I really flipped out. This is so fucked up, I'm thinking, as I wheel the trash can across the street to their driveway and dump it.”

“Serves them right.”

“Exactly. And then I walked back, got another trash can (also full of shit, by the way), and dumped it too. And did it again. By the time I’m done, there’s this garbage dump in the middle of their driveway.”

“You showed them.”

“That’s what I thought. Until the police knocked at my door.”

“The police!”

“Seems I dumped more than their shit on the driveway. I also dumped my own trash. With my name all over it. Stupid, I know, but I was crazed.”

“What did they do?”

“I tried to explain, but they didn’t care. All they knew was what they saw. And what they saw means criminal trespass, mischief, vandalism. Normally they’d issue a warning, but the yuppie insists they press charges. The D.A. may or may not take the case – I’ve hired a lawyer, meter’s running at $500 per, and he thinks he can beat it back. Used to work in that office.”

“Oh my god, that sucks.”

“Tell me about it. And I’ve installed one of those high tech security systems, alarms and sensors and monitors and 24 hour infrared cameras recording everything that moves, it’s like I live in a 7-11 or something. Cost me a fortune.”

“So much for the peaceful life.”

“Well, it’s better than sitting around, just waiting to die. You know, retirement isn’t easy for a guy like me. For years I’ve operated at the highest level, solving only the toughest problems, managing only the biggest projects, never having to bother with the small stuff, then all of a sudden my life revolves around picayune shit like this, stuff I would never have cared about, or even noticed, when I was working. It’s like I built up this huge materiality threshold while I worked, then it disappeared the day I retired. Now I notice everything. Nothing is beneath my attention. Maybe that’s a good thing, I don’t know, but all I know is a few weeks ago I was bored stiff, thinking I needed a really big challenge, to wrap my mind around a tough problem, one with lots of risk, big consequences, if I want to keep my blood flowing.”

“Now it’s boiling.”

“At least my life has a purpose again.”

“To get that bastard back?”

“Exactly.”

“You should thank him.”

“You can bet I will,” he said as he picked up the menu, smiling for the first time since we sat down.

Budding Young Guitar God

Paul burst onto the scene in seventh grade, taking the stage during a school talent show and plugging his new white Strat into a Marshall stack and blowing us away with an over-amped feedback-laden thousand-extra-notes-added version of Jimi Hendrix’s “The Star-Spangled Banner,” his long hair whipped around his head as his waist gyrated slower then faster as his fingers raced up and down the neck of his low-slung guitar faster faster faster and then he looked up, face drenched with sweat, complete ecstasy in his eyes, and he hammered home the last few notes, spraying them over the heads of a stunned prepubescent audience as he fell back, utterly spent.

And thus was born another budding young guitar god. Is it any wonder that from then on Paul got all the girls?

I too wanted the girls. I too wanted the ecstasy. I too wanted the music. I begged him to show me how. He fingered the opening notes to Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” and then handed me his white Stratocaster and let me try. I carefully fingered the notes a few times, concluded I too could be a budding young guitar god, and went home and told my parents I wanted an electric guitar for my thirteenth birthday.

To save money, and decibels, they bought me an acoustic guitar.

A Yamaha steel string, dreadnought design, it wasn’t much to look at. A big dent in its bottom had relegated it to the clearance section at the music store where it waited to be rescued by my thrifty parents. The guitar had horrible action, not that I knew what was back then. I just knew that the strings were really high and hard to hold down and sometimes buzzed even when I managed to hold them down just right. Meanwhile, the heavy-gauge steel strings dug deep grooves into my finger tips. They throbbed for months until my calluses grew in.

The guitar wouldn’t stay in tune. I had no sense of pitch, and I didn’t own a tuner, so I could only wonder why “Heartbreaker” sounded so different on my guitar. Not that I was playing much “Heartbreaker,” a song that turned out to be difficult for a tone deaf beginner with throbbing finger tips to play on an out-of-tune steel-string acoustic with horrible action. Instead I was strumming songs like “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” and other three chord ditties culled from Favorite Folk Songs, a perpetually-renewed library book with the singular distinction of including EZ chord diagrams over each song.

I’ll say this for the guitar: It was loud. Man, it boomed. Not as loud as Paul’s Strat played through his Marshall amp, of course, but loud enough to drown out the wimpy little nylon-stringed guitars played by the other beginners at the group guitar lessons my parents pushed me into after hearing one too many booming fret-buzzing atonal renditions of “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain.” Jammed into a little windowless tile-floored room deep in the bowels of the Learning Tree building, my errantly strummed steel-stringed guitar notes atonally reverberating back and forth over the muted strums of the nylon-stringed notes, I can safely state that when I played, every head turned.

Somehow I survived the dirty looks.

Between “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” and other Favorite Folk Songs at home, and beginner friendly fare such as “Mary Had a Little Lamb” at the Learning Tree, I wasn’t making much progress towards budding young guitar godness. I needed private lessons, preferably from a long hair dirty jeans roach-clip-on-the-guitar-strap type who’d fill me with the latest licks and riffs and let me jam on his electric guitar and then convince my parents that I really needed a Strat and a Marshall stack to realize my budding young musical potential.

Instead they found Catherine, the daughter of a couple they knew through church. Catherine was a master, or should I say mistress, of the classical guitar, a Ph.D. candidate in music who took it all very seriously. She certainly looked the part: A severe woman of ancient age – at least 22, maybe 23 – dark hair tied back in a tight bun, button-down shirts and long skirts, hose with flat-heels, all prim and proper-like, she sat stiff and straight, her little Spanish guitar propped high on her left thigh, left foot on a stand, left thumb braced behind the fretboard while her right arm rested just over the strings, fingers poised to pick out just the right notes in succession. She never used a pick or played a lick, preferring scales and traditional Spanish classical pieces. She was good, very good, I’m sure, but she was the furthest from a long hair dirty jeans roach-clip-on-the-guitar-strap type I could imagine.

Disappointed, I nevertheless played along, perfectly aware that if I quit, my parents weren’t likely to pay for lessons with anyone else, and that I was incapable of finding (and paying) my own teacher. I’m sure I sported my patented sullen and mutinous glare as I rotely fingered my way through scales, arpeggios, free strokes and rest strokes, minding my p’s and ima’s, all the while sitting straight and stiff, my right hand perpendicular to the strings, my left thumb hidden behind the fretboard, all under Catherine’s watchful eye.

She wasn’t nearly as severe as she looked, filling my morose silences with chatter and a running commentary on our lesson that always highlighted what I did right before mentioning, almost apologetically, all the stuff I’d done wrong. She addressed me as an equal, something that’s hard for a teacher to do, and something no adult had ever done with me before. She somehow managed to make learning the guitar seem like the easiest and the hardest task one could undertake, both reassuring me when I messed up and encouraging me to keep wanting it, and working at it.

This went on for many months, maybe a year, long enough for me to learn to tune my guitar, to run through a bunch of scales without looking and to play some beginner classical pieces with hardly any errant buzzes and awkward pauses. And long enough for me to develop a kinda crush on Catherine, the sort you never admit, especially when you’re a pimply-faced thirteen year old with peach fuzz under your nose and she’s at least ten years older and wearing an engagement ring.

By this point I was well on my way to becoming a Segovia on steel strings, but there was something wrong. Far from being a budding young guitar god, I was now a budding young guitar geek. And only getting geekier. It was time for our come to Jesus moment, a moment that took a few weeks as I tried to screw up sufficient courage to tell her what I really wanted, a moment that came only after she looked at me funny one day and asked what was wrong and I opened my mouth and it all gushed out (all except my crush, of course) and, to my astonishment, instead of recoiling in horror and making the sign of the cross, she nodded her head, asked me to tell her exactly what I wanted to do, I mumbled the words “Led Zeppelin” and the next week I lugged my boombox and a cassette of Led Zeppelin IV into the lesson.

I watched her face intently as we listened to “Stairway to Heaven,” fearing an expression of disgusted disdain with the slop I aspired to play. She did frown, but it was out of concentration, for she stopped the tape at the part where Robert Plant starts with “There’s a lady who’s sure...,” picked up her little classical guitar and played the entire guitar part up to that point. Note perfect. First time she’d heard it.

“This is easy,” she said, starting the tape again, playing along as she heard it. “I like this part, it has a nice lilt,” she said, probably the first and only person to ever use the word “lilt” while describing Led Zeppelin. “But it’s so primitive, you really want to learn this?”

I did. We talked. She taught. And it turns out she wanted something from me, too, so we struck a deal. Each week we’d spend half the lesson on my stuff. I can still see us sitting there, just like it was yesterday, the two of us crunching our acoustic guitars to Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” unplugged long before there was an Unplugged.

Now when I used the words “come to Jesus moment” to describe this episode, I meant them both figuratively and literally. Figuratively in the sense that I finally confessed to Catherine my hidden love for primitive no-skill crunching guitar licks, literally in the sense that the next Sunday morning found me fulfilling my part of the deal, standing on the church alter next to Catherine as we energetically strummed the latest Christian folk hymns for hundreds of god-fearing folk gathered for the Young People’s Service. Catherine was only willing to sully my strings with satanic licks if I’d cleanse them strumming Jesus songs. My parents thought it was a great idea.

The Christian folk songs were a lot like the three-chord folk ditties from Favorite Folk Songs, maybe a few more references to Jesus, and after a year of Catherine’s formal training I’d could strum them in my sleep, so my gig as a Christian folk guitarist didn’t do anything to advance my budding young guitar godness. In fact, as a doubting young atheist it didn’t do anything to advance me towards godness. But it did give me and my guitar an audience. A good, appreciative audience. They worshipped our music. Literally.

(You know, sometimes I look back on scenes like this from my life -- this picture in my mind of a pimply-faced scowling atheistic teenager who yearned to be Jimmy Page strumming folk hymns for Christians swaying back and forth, arms open wide to receive the spirit -- and I can only sigh and say what a long strange trip it’s been.)

And thus I spent the next few years learning heavy metal licks on my acoustic guitar on Wednesdays and strumming for the Lord on Sundays, until I hit high school, started hanging out with girls late on Saturday nights, or at least trying to hang out with girls late on Saturday nights, and sleeping later and later the following Sunday until one too many no-shows moved Catherine to terminate my church gig. I’d started skipping lessons too, my interests now ranging far and wide to girls and how to find girls and what the girls were doing and what I might do with the girls. My beat-up Yamaha acoustic guitar gathered dust. My cravings for an electric guitar remained unfulfilled. Along with my budding young guitar god dream.

When I left for college, I left the guitar behind. Too big to lug across the country, I reasoned. And what was I going to do? Play Jesus tunes for my dorm mates, maybe liven things up with acoustic Deep Purple riffs?

My brother sold the guitar without telling me. I didn’t find out until years later. That’s how far I’d drifted from the guitar.

So let’s review: Just as I turn thirteen, hormones beginning to rage, my young body budding its way to maturity with pimples and peach fuzz breaking out everywhere, girls in my mind but, in the flesh, miles away for the foreseeable future, I develop this deep attraction to the guitar and its sensuous feminine curves, an instrument that with just the right touch can produce any sound, from a gentle purr as your left hand fingertips apply a little tremolo massage to the fretboard to a howling wail as your left hand races up and down the smooth stiff neck in perfect time with your rhythmically strumming right hand, all in beautiful harmony. And my infatuation with the guitar continues throughout puberty and into my adolescent years, abating just when I finally find me some girls. And today, when I see footage of a budding young guitar god in the throes of ecstasy, much like Paul, his low-slung guitar protruding straight out of his nether regions as his waist writhes rhythmically in time with his rapid stroking and caressing of the long hard neck, well, we don’t need a psychology degree to understand what’s really going on here, do we?

But, then again, sometimes a guitar is just a guitar.

At least that’s what I told myself last month as I held for the first time in my loving hands my very own electric guitar, a sweet Fender Telecaster, and, looking down to be sure the Gain and Volume dials were turned to “8” (don’t want to be too rash, yet), then looking left to check my power “G” chord, amazed my fingers are still callused after over 25 years, I closed my eyes and paused a second to contemplate the enormity of the moment as another dream is finally fulfilled, then I slashed down hard and blasted the opening notes of “Smoke on the Water” over the hillside and down into the valley below, heralding to all the rebirth of a budding old guitar god.

Good Morning

I live up in the mountains, my house perched near the edge, which gives me a 300-degree view. Look out one side, and you see the city sprawled out below. On a clear day you can see landmarks twenty miles away. Look out the other side, and you see nothing but nature: Meadows, foothills and mountains all the way to the horizon.

At night, the city view sparkles with thousands of lights, blotting out the stars. In summer the lights visibly shimmer in the heat, as if they’re underwater. The nature view at night is always a sea of black, allowing the stars on that side to sparkle brightly.

Standing outside my house, looking one way and then the other, you get the sense you’re straddling the border between the civilized and the primeval, the light and the darkness. And you might think you know in which direction the border is moving, but up there at night, surrounded by the sounds of the wind howling, the trees creaking, the coyotes calling, the owls hooting and the bugs chirping, while the city silently sleeps, unaware, you're not so sure.

Early this morning, before the dawn, I stumbled out of bed and into the shower and looked out the window towards the city and saw darkness where I used to see lights. Was it raining? I looked up and saw stars, so it couldn’t be. In fact, I couldn’t remember ever seeing the stars above the city before. Had the power gone out? Not likely over an entire city.

As I gazed out the window, looking for some sign of life, it occurred to me that this was how it looked from up here at night before the city. And this is how it will look after the city. Total darkness below while the stars shine above. Had the border shifted while I slept? Or disappeared?

I showered and watched the sun rise, a huge orange ball slowly growing over the horizon, revealing a blanket of thick fog covering the city, its tendrils curling up around the hills below, stopping just short of my house. I stood there in the shower, hot water streaming down my back, the first rays warming my face, just me and the sun, while the city slept on in the darkness below.