Pine Tree Paradise

I’ve often written about the filthy state of my car. It is a nondescript Hyundai station wagon that gets trashed by three children without enough telling off (or should we say guidance) from their exhausted parents.

We had to fetch granny and granddad from the airport not long ago and my seven-year-old pointed out a problem.

“They can’t sit in the car,” she said. “We have to clean the food off the seats. That’s why.”

Good point.

We got the vacuum cleaner to suck up the weeks-old bread crusts, candies, cookies and French fries along with the dirt and sand. We picked up the candy wrappers, water bottles, apple juice boxes and coffee cups. Even a half-eaten McDonald’s hamburger. We filled a bag with toys and put them in their place in the house. We polished the dashboard and wiped the fingerprints off the windows. The car had been too long without a bath – and too long a moveable feast for ants, roaches and who knows what else.

Yet it is this filth that is fodder for stories to write and tell.

Ask my children in the months between the car’s washes. They see things, they hear things. They hold their noses and pull their legs up and jump out when the car stops.

I write down what they tell me.

And now you can read an extremely short tale about it, an extremely short and published tale about it.

I will highlight the key word again: published.

You can check it out on Trapeze Magazine.

It’s short but it’s a start in my effort to get my fiction published.

Now it’s time to get out the vacuum cleaner and the hose and find a net to catch any fleeing critters from my faithfully filthy car. Or, shall we say, my filthily faithful car.

“Dad, can you buy me a guitar because I want to play the guitar? Like this,” my eldest daughter tells me as she strums a pretend guitar.

The seven-year-old doesn’t wait for a response.

“I want to take lessons. An electric guitar. And I’ll need a microphone. Not a toy one, a real one. Cause we’re going to play rock and roll. I’m going to sing and play the guitar, and my friends are going to play other instruments. We’ll be a band.”

She tells me the lineup.

“And will you have a name for the band?” I ask.

“We don’t know yet, but we’re going to play in the street. We’ll make money from people who come to listen to us. Coins and maybe some bills.”

“That’d be good.”

“So?”

“So, what?”

“Guitar lessons, Dad. When do I start?”

“Soon,” I say, thinking my eldest is truly growing up and the days are vanishing of “Dora the Explorer” and the “Tellitubbies” and catching fairy dust in the sunrays beaming into the house through the windows. We used to look for monsters in darkened rooms, and dodge bats and witches in the woods. Now we’ll be learning chords. Her friends will come over to practice. They’ll hang out in her room with the door closed, writing lyrics and turning up the amps. They’ll jam. They’ll dig this band and that band, influences that will set the course for their music. They’ll be a band and they will play their first gig on the street for all the public to see.

I once played bass in a band when I was a kid, but we never made it out of the garage. We never made it onto a flyer for a concert at the Federal Building in West L.A., my home town.

My daughter will play on the street. That’s brave, that’s guts. I like it. It’s good to dream large.

“Okay, then,” I tell me daughter. “Let’s find you a guitar instructor.”