ROOM WITH A VIEW

The first thing that grabbed me about The Arcade Fire was this:

"But sometimes, we remember our bedrooms,
And our parents' bedrooms,
And the bedrooms of our friends."

MY BEDROOM
I had the same bedroom for the first 15 years of my life. The door didn't lock, and my dog would push it open with her nose every night to come sleep on my bed.

The inside of the closet was smeared with glow-in-the-dark paint, which in a lapse of judgment my parents had given to me one early Christmas.

When I was five or six, I got a poster of the Pals vitamins animal friends, and I would stare at it, concentrating, every night before I went to sleep. I had vivid imaginings of them coming to life and protecting me from the thing under the pillow that wanted to nibble on my fingers.

I had a wooden toy chest into which I was constantly shoveling my latest haul of baseball cards. I was not a sorter, and certainly not a preserver, but rather an amasser.

MY PARENTS' BEDROOM
My parents had two queen-size beds, which were on wheels and pushed together. If you weren't careful in navigating a move from one bed to the other, they would split apart like a stressed fault line.

My father kept Playboys in his dresser, which I uncovered in the course of some idle sick-day explorations. Several years after I made that discovery, my mom moved the magazines and stowed them under the flag that had been draped recently over my father's coffin. The flag had been folded into a tight military triangle. I don't know why she didn't just throw the Playboys out...

THE BEDROOM OF MY FRIEND
My best friend's bedroom was larger than mine, and we would use the space to spread out our shared collection of 45s. We spent long hours arguing the merits of KISS (he in favor, me opposed), witchcraft (he in favor, me opposed), and skateboarding (he in favor, me in favor, but inept). In this room, his sadistic babysitter beat him to the point of hospitalization with his own flute.

So all hail The Arcade Fire for understanding not only the power of memory, but the power of the specific locations of memory....