No. 973 – Switch Opens

Performer: Soundgarden

Songwriters: Ben Shepherd, Chris Cornell

Original Release: Down on the Upside

Year: 1996

Definitive Version: None

Memories being what they are, sometimes I need the helping hand of the Internet to make sure the time frame is correct—that a particular album came out in, say, 1995 instead of 1996. I have a clear vision of walking from the nearby grocery store to the apartment that Debbie and I moved into in Gahanna with this song on my Walkman, but the timeline for the story that I have today might not quite fit. In fact, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what I think of when I hear this song.

After we moved in, Debbie and I planted bulbs in the fall of 1995, so we’d have daffodils and tulips and a few hyacinths the next spring. The layout of the apartments in this complex was such that the “front” door faced a fence opposite of the driveway. In effect, you parked your car in the “back” and entered the apartment either through the garage or “back” door to the kitchen/eating area.

One day the next spring, I was walking back from the grocery store and noticed that the garden out “front” (hidden from view from most of the traffic in the complex), which had been a sea of yellow the day before, was all green. Upon further inspection, I saw that someone—not Debbie—had come along and cut all of our daffodils. The most maddening part was that whoever did it cut them right at the head, leaving a patch of green stems.

Whoever did it took the flowers; it wasn’t that the heads or petals were scattered about. That led Debbie to conclude that it was some little kid who didn’t know any better and cut the flowers for his mom, but I know a miscreant flower-cutting thug when I see one, or at least the work of one. I was ticked. I didn’t go through all that digging—at the expense of watching college football, mind you—just so some slingshot-using urchin who had had one too few spankings could eradicate my garden.

I maintained a constant vigil after that, just in case anyone else got any ideas when the tulips came up. Fortunately for him or her, the tulips were left intact.

(Sigh) Only 31, and already I was ready to tell a wayward punk to get off my lawn.