I can’t forget my little stucco house on Guthrie street. At dusk the light would catch Guthrie’s street sign, shooting glares through my bedroom window, affixing the memory of that sight at the front of my memory. Oakbridge and Rockwood didn’t puzzle me, but Guthrie, what was that? I’ve never known how to shut my mind off when it settles into speculation. For my parents this meant an unrelenting eagerness to question everything. But answers to the real questions, not why a brain freeze happens, or why the stop lights are red, yellow, and green, but the questions with consequences, those questions I sometimes wish went unasked. As for that Guthrie street sign, it’s fun to think of it as a signal from the “Dust Bowl Troubador” himself, Woody Guthrie, picking me out early on, singing to me before I had answers that hurt the both of us.At one point, Meaghan had the idea of having everyone in our group of friends write essays about where we're from and putting them in an anthology. I never got around to writing mine, but I probably should.
(Here's another chapter for that anthology, this one about Medicine Hat, Alberta.)
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