8600 E Colfax

Click for map: 8600 E Colfax / lat 39.73991855982667 lon -104.88747373233073

Call 720-845-5413 extension 39 to hear this dream.

You stand on the sidewalk as buses drive by. Each bus contains different chain restaurant or chain store, so as people ride the buses to their destinations they order blooming onions or nacho plates, or play arcade games, or buy flat-screen tvs or lightweight camping gear. The street is clogged with these chain-store buses, each filled with people buying more & more things. You turn away from the street & see a bright, new garden growing. A young woman kneels in the dirt, tending to the hundreds of flowers, their wide petals big & dense with color. She finishes weeding & shoveling & leans back. She interlaces her fingers & stretches them above her head. Then she kneels upright & spreads her long fingers out. She tentatively touches a flower, & at that exact same moment a truck horn sounds down the road. She touches another flower & on the far side of the street breaks out in musical laughter. Then, like a concert pianist, she presses her fingers to the flowers, hands ranging all over the garden, & with each flower she touches a sound rises from the city around you. At first, the sounds are chaotic & random, but then, as the woman quickly gets a feel for things, the music of the city becomes more regular & organized, symphonic & complex. You pick up the first thing you see on the sidewalk, just a piece of debris that you’d normally walk right by, & you tap it with your fingers, playing it like a drum. But as you play it you see that it is more than a drum. You pick something else off the sidewalk & press the two pieces together like a violin & it bow. And these pieces of debris that you’d normally think of as trash, they make a beautiful sound. All around you, people begin to strum street signs & bang the palms of their hands against walls & pick up stuff off the streets & teach themselves quickly how to turn this debris, this seeming trash, into musical instruments, & they all play along with the woman & her garden, listening to each other, finding the spaces where their music fits & finding the places where their silence makes the music grow stronger. And even the buses stop & the people step out of the buses & they all lift their voices in a great choir. Everyone is singing, & you are shocked to find that you too are singing, a wordless song, a melody that feels like you’ve known it your whole life. And the music makes its way down Colfax toward downtown, moving north & south, gaining participants in the music, intermingling more instruments & voices, more melodies & variations.