I grew up in a big old Colonial farmhouse, fourteen rooms, even one room big enough to be a formal ballroom, which we called, logically enough, the big room. The house had window seats, a high second floor and an even higher attic, one with a cedar room built into the center of it, cedar drawers and cedar cabinets and cedar lockers built right in. We used to leave our toys strewn across the empty space, as the entrance was right outside our bedroom door, so this was our fortress, our sailing ship, our clubhouse, and our Vietcong jungle.

I’m certain my wife would have loved this house, and she would view the cedar room as a bonus beyond compare. But as a nerdy little boy with an overactive imagination, that attic was a source of sheer terror for me, and I eventualy came to dread playing up there.

August days are often golden, rich and warm with light.

Soft focus, blurred edges, a boy playing with a whiffle ball and bat in the street, scrap of a thing, rangy, bespectacled, intense. Six years old, going on seven, with four months until my birthday.

The moment was just before dusk, that special time, when the clear soft blues of day fade through silver into the cool deep blues of night. The street lights had not yet come on, so the magic signal had not been given. Hungry, but unwilling to waste even a few minutes of ‘free-range’ time, I tracked the arc of my ball against the stone garage wall, weedy and dark.

Ball flipped high instead of low, I fumbled my catch and my eyes tracked upward, lighting in a window of the house’s attic.

Unknown to me at the time, the windowsill was a repository for a basketball in need of air, and someone had put a fishing hat on it, lures and all.

But what I saw burned itself into every cell of my being, and flavored the rest of the time I lived in that particular house. A cheap canvas hat, perched casually on top of a battered Wilson that had a slow leak. To the eyes of a soon to be seven year old male imagination generation machine housed in the frame of bespectacled youth that was no less than an escaped convict hiding out, on the lam, who was even then watching every move I made. My optic nerve took in the pebbled leather and glinting hat, and registered it as a human face watching in fear.