It is (or was) Robin Kuretsky’s birthday, thirty-first of the month, a number mirrored in my own thirteenth, like two cards from a fortune deck flipped in opposite hands. Inversions, and at fourteen, such things seemed drenched in cosmic intent. Especially when you’re wondering if the American is going to kiss you before someone starts playing “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” A USY conclave, that bridge of awkward smiles and over-applied deodorant duck-taped between Minneapolis and Winnipeg. A kind of cultural no-man’s-land where the northern boys wore uncertainty and the American girls had lip gloss and devastating orthodontics. Robin was above my station, until the talent show was announced. Then, like magic, her gaze acquired curiosity, like a spotlight on me, “Did you write that” she asked. I’m pretty sure I claimed at least three songs by George Harrison were my own. I hope time destroyed that cassette. I followed her to summer camp that July, friendless, heartthumping, hopeful. Rewarded on the first day with a neatly folded breakup letter handed to me on the bus. The ink smelled like shampoo. I stared at the window wondering what torture these next two weeks will be. But music, as it so often does for the forsaken, intervened. The counsellors found it amazing that the strange northern kid could play many songs off Sail Away by Randy Newman. “Play ‘He Gives us All his Love’,” they asked. “Do the one about the Old Man Dying.” I obliged. They asked me to play special events. I was in demand. There was even a senior counsellor from New York who informed me, offhandedly, that his high school was the site of Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night recording and he attended it. I stared at him like he was Neil’s best friend. Robin was forgotten. Or rather, transformed into a myth. What is adolescence if not the period when every small humiliation is turned, eventually, into art?