The Blue Room

The first time I walked into that empty house, I went into the blue room, only it wasn't blue. It was maybe white, and there were kid's toys on the floor, leftover from who knows when. And I remembered growing up in Ohio - in a house not unlike this one - and being a kid, in a bedroom about that size, looking out my window, at a garage.

There's a tree with purple flowers that you can see from the blue room when the blinds are up. It’s a small tree, and this spring, the purple flowers will be in full bloom, sunlight shining through them, making them each their own shade of purple. When I sit in that room - on the rarest occasion - I look out the window - and wonder what my life would have been like, had I’d grown up with all that sunshine pouring through my window, and to have seen all of those purple flowers each spring.

But our Ohio garage wasn’t just a garage. There were bushes around it and my mom did some gardening around there. When it wasn’t winter, I got to see the bushes, and maybe a chipmunk or a squirrel eating an acorn. I used to throw some kind of seeds out there that would attract birds. My childhood window wasn't a big one, but I looked through it and dreamed big dreams. 

In the blue room, I can sit down and get a sense of what it may have been like, to be a child, who grew up somewhere in there. I wonder what they dreamed about.

I don't go in there often. I feel so old in that room. But I do sleep there sometime, with the little Spanish alarm clock beside me, and an old copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, and imagine Casey Kasem’s voice. For just a few moments, I remember my childhood innocence, that I knew, even back then, wouldn’t last forever. There were too many adults around as evidence of the hardships of life that were to come. You could see it in their distant eyes; in how slowly it took them to get out of a chair, in their ashtrays full of cigarette butts, in their twitchy feet, in how bored they looked, and the smell of gin. But I have moments in that blue room where I don't think about anything except how nice those flowers make me feel.