I was a strange child, even more strange than I have become as an adult. Indeed my current quirks and habits, my infatuations and my pet peeves are simply aged versions of the oddities that were constantly exploding from my childhood frame.
The strangest thing about me, beyond the constant cravings for mayonnaise and my innate need to sing show tunes at the top of my lungs, was my love of the a-typical landscapes. I loved water towers, rusty train tracks, and awkward buildings. Their imperfections and bizarre qualities were beautiful to me or at least honest. I felt at home among the broken things in our world – the shattered windows, the potholes, the fallen tree branches. I felt a connection with the out-of-place pieces around me – Telephone wires, gutters, and cars unused in so many years that they had grow into the place they were left.
I felt a similarity to these things – an inexplicable kinship. And there was one thing, one monument protruding out of the horizon of my childhood that echoed the awkwardness I felt inside every time I looked at it.
Out my window and stuck into the pristine and relatively untouched ground of Annapolis was a radio tower with its flashing red cap and skeletal form speaking to me a language I understood – a language to belong.
“Oh that thing is so hideous. I can’t stand it. Why can’t they put it somewhere else?” I would hear the complaints still every night I would whisper the unspoken poundings of my heart to this creature as if it were a star with its seat in the heavens. It was a comfort to me though I had no idea why at the time. It accompanied my childhood and was a constant presence as I grew up.
Its feet awkwardly touched the same thick grass of the nearby field where I ran day after day with blades whipping against my bare and brown knees. It sat there high above my town and saw everything. It saw me grow up and it saw Annapolis change around it.
Slowly and surely I forgot it even existed as we forget things that were once precious to us like a blanket, or a place, or a friend.
And now years have gone by without even a shudder. They must pass and we must change. Childhood has gone. The radio tower that was so familiar to me in my youth has not even a mark on the ground as a memorial of its existence.
How does it happen? Where do those things go? Does God have some strange and divine storehouse where these things are kept? Do they go to a place hung with pirate hooks, and fairy dust, and bright eyes?
Though my life has changed and it’s landscape as well, I still search for things that echo the sentiments of my heart yet now, instead of looking at the broken things of the world, I look to the sky and I search for a small blinking red light and hope that it might give me some reassurance that I still belong.
