True North

This morning Jimmy Page has blue wings.

I listen to Led Zeppelin’s Ramble On. I travel to 1974. I’m on Paradise road with my father. We pick-up a hitchhiker, a shirtless hippie man with dirty blond hair. In broken English, my father tells the skinny Jesus that we are only going to the store to buy milk. Only. In broken Spanish, the hippie informs us that he is heading north. El norte is not here. My father lied to me. The north is not a small apartment for eight people. The north is not a grapevine. The north is not a place where tired children help their parents pick table grapes. The north is not a place where a teacher tells her student that from now on durazno will be peach. I want to go north.