fireworks over Disneyland, they looked about this far away from our rooftop
I wasn’t just at Disneyland a month ago. It was more than that. I was at the place of my childhood. I was two miles from the little Anaheim cul-de-sac where I grew up until age ten. Towering juniper trees stood to the left of my house. An olive tree branched out from our front yard. I flew across the blacktop street when I crashed over the handlebars on my purple bike and lodged gravel into my skin. I’d sit on the cracked sidewalks and wonder about the little ants and what they said to each other in the privacy of their tiny homes. Garbage cans sat to the right, where one time I saw thousands of squirming white maggots. On summer nights I would climb onto the rooftop with my cousins, watching the exploding colors in the Disneyland sky. I remember the map of the streets, the way the neighborhood was enormous in every way. The drive from one end to the other felt so long. Time and space had an entirely different meaning for me from 1975 to 1985. To small me, it was three times the size that it is now to grown up me. I revisit those streets on occasion when I’m back in Southern California, and the streets are so humble, so quiet. Hard to imagine they held my whole world. Even now the map of those streets are in my dreams. When I sleep, I often walk them and live in them; they are still home to me. It’s still the longest I ever lived in one place. After that, with the disruptions of life, from age ten to twenty I had 14 different addresses, and I’ve had at least eight more since then. I’ve now been rooted in one spot since 2004, but that place of my childhood in the shadows of Disneyland– that Anaheim map will always be simply Home.
art + life 