Sakura Square / 1255 19th St

Click here for map: Sakura Square / 1255 19th St / lat 39.75180443380005 lon -104.99341277415398

Call 720-845-5413 extension 18 to hear this dream.

You are a superhero, wearing a costume with a mask & a cape & everything. And all around you people walking by & driving by & sitting in the sun are in superhero costumes too. You’re unsure what you’re super-powers are, though. You hop onto a parked car’s hood & leap into the air to see if you might be able to fly, but you just land back on the ground. You punch a metal sign to see if you might have super strength, but you just scrape your knuckles. All the other superheroes around you seem to have already figured out their powers. They hover over the sidewalks or flicker in & out of visibility & conjure little lightning bolts down from the sky & then play with them like yo-yos. Disheartened, you wander up into the garden & stand before the statue of Minoru Yasui & read about how he defied the unjust laws against Japanese-Americans. Suddenly the superheroes with their flying around & their little lightning bolts don’t seem so important at all. They perform their super-powers like tricks, amused by their own wonderful abilities. Maybe the cape & the costume & the super-human trickery is not what makes one a hero at all. You take your costume off. Beneath it, you are wearing your regular clothes. They feel good. You feel like yourself. And in that moment you know that the heroic things you can do are the things that only you can do, not super-human things, but the things you can do to help people when you are able to do them. You look up into the sky & see a single, chubby cloud floating in the blue expanse. And you see a person sitting nearby in the sun who looks very thirsty. You pull a paper straw from the little pocket. You pull the straw out & out, out to the full extension of your arm, then switch hands & pull further with the other arm & then further & further, the paper straw rising higher & higher into the air, never wobbling or folding over, rising straight up until the straw’s far tip reaches the cloud. Then you take a little pair of silver scissors out & cut an end to the paper straw on your side & hold the end to your lips. You carry the end of the straw to the thirty-looking person & hand it to them. They take a long sip of the cloud through the straw, drawing the cool, refreshing vapor down into their mouth.