Cal asked me why I was there by myself and I added a couple of lines about how it was my birthday and my dad had ditched me; Cal said, “That sucks” in a way that made me feel better.

“At least you have a dad. Mine left before I was born. I’ve never even met him.”

Cal grabbed the drumsticks from his back pocket and started playing a beat on the edge of the picnic table. Then he nodded toward my guitar and said, “Wanna jam?”

I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I picked up the guitar and played the chord progression from an old Doug Blackman tune. Cal continued to play drums on the table, humming a melody over what I was doing, and pretty soon we had the makings of a song. Not a good song, but a song nevertheless.

That’s when something started happening inside of me. It was as though the world was changing right in front of my eyes. I was changing. I know most of the time people describe monumental moments of their life as taking shape, but it’s the exact opposite for me. I’d spent the last two years in a sharp and silent world, playing guitar by myself, and as Cal and I played together, I felt all the jagged edges inside of me start to soften and blur into something warm and ecstatic. My life suddenly seemed more bearable than it had in a long time, and I was glad Bob had bailed on me.

Cal and I stayed in the woods and made up songs all afternoon. When it started to get cold, I put my shoes back on, and we packed up and headed toward my house.

On our hike home, Cal asked me what I was up to for the rest of the weekend; I wrote that my mom was gone until Sunday night. She thought I was going to be with my dad, so she and Chuck had gone to Tahoe, and I hadn’t bothered to tell her otherwise.

Cal suggested that he and I go back to my house, listen to Chuck’s CDs, and learn more songs.

Cool, I wrote.

As we were crossing Panoramic Highway, Cal looked over at me and said, “Yo, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

I’d never given it much thought because Bob had already decided for me. I stopped and wrote, My dad says I’m going to take over his company. U?

“Duh,” Cal said. “I’m going to be a musician.”

Until Cal said that, it had never occurred to me that I could choose to play guitar as a profession, but it suddenly seemed like what I was born to do.

Me too, I wrote.

Cal spun around and walked backward, glaring at me with his little owl eyes as if he were a strigiform truth detector trying to measure how serious I was.

“For real?” he asked. “You swear?”

I wrote I SWEAR on my palm and held it up to him, nodding frantically at the same time.