Foundations

Christopher grew up through a difficult childhood and foster care. Part of what made it difficult has a name: a hip disease that was destroying the joint while nobody knew.

During the last period he lived with his biological mother and stepfather, Christopher developed severe Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease — a childhood condition in which the blood supply to the hip fails and the joint starts to break down. It kept progressing through the moves that followed, into and through foster care.

He hid the pain. Not once, as a secret — as a habit. A child moving through family disruption had learned not to reveal what hurt, so he kept walking, kept going to school, and kept the severity to himself while the damage compounded. Through every placement and every transition, the condition went unrecognized.

Then he arrived at what he calls his forever home. His adoptive mother noticed almost immediately that something was seriously wrong — and acted immediately. He was medically evaluated at once, and about a week later, at about age 12, he underwent emergency reconstructive hip surgery. She didn't cure the disease; the damage was already advanced. What she changed was simpler and larger: the pain was finally seen, believed, and answered.

The childhood operation managed the damage. It never erased it. At 23, the joint had to be replaced entirely — a total hip replacement at an age when most people haven't thought about their hips once. The disease that began in a house he had to leave ended in hardware he still carries. That is the body under everything else on this site.

Home, in this story, was never a given. It was found once, at twelve — and rebuilt more than once since. Through the rebuilding years of the last decade and a half, one presence has stayed constant: Splash, Christopher's tuxedo cat — sixteen years old now, green-eyed, and the one Christopher calls his grounding force. Listeners already know him: he appears by name across the catalog, and he's the one photographed in the guitar case in the bio. He isn't a mascot and this isn't a memorial. He's a living member of the household, still on duty.

Three songs come from before Christopher had any idea he would write songs. They are the earliest memories he can hold clearly enough to build on, and they happened in this order.

Red-Flash Sneakers

He was three going on four. It was summer, and his grandfather had a big van — sliding door, three rows of seats, an aisle running along the side. A trip somewhere: his grandfather, his mother, him. The adults sat up front. He was supposed to take one of the back seats and made a big deal about the way back instead — and won. The reason was simple: he hated wearing his seatbelt, and in the way back nobody could see him take it off. The van got moving, the belt came off, and the plan worked.

Then he was alone back there, and alone got lonely. The two of them were talking and laughing up front about something he couldn't hear, and not hearing it made it worse. He wanted in. So he stood up and started walking the aisle toward them.

The van took a curve. He lost his balance, grabbed the handle of the sliding door, and the door opened — and out he went with it.

His head hit the curb — directly on the curb — and he rolled. He was out for only a couple of seconds. When he got up, the van was on down the road and still moving, and he could see the taillights. He didn't know taillights meant it was slowing. All he knew was that the van was still going and nobody had noticed he was gone.

Then it came back at him in reverse and stopped, and his grandfather was out of the driver's seat and running. He picked the boy up, and the first thing the boy told him was that he had to get his shoes — red sneakers that lit up, the favorite thing he owned, gone somewhere between the door and the road. The answer was a single furious profanity about the shoes, at full volume.

His grandfather put him in his mother's lap in the passenger seat. She was screaming and crying, and he lay looking up at her looking down at him — and that was what scared him, so he started crying too.

Then the daylight went dark. Broad daylight, and it went dark, and he told his mother it was nighttime. She told him no — he couldn't sleep, he had to keep his eyes open — and she kept slapping his face to keep him awake. He was seeing his grandmother, his brother, his cousin — everybody he knew and loved, one after another.

The next thing he knew, he was on an operating table being stitched back together.

He was fine after that. His head swelled for a while, his family treated him very well for a long time, and they still talk about it.

Bank Error

He was six or seven, out in the woods on the outskirts of Whitehall with his cousin David. It was the nineties; kids had free roam of the town, and the two of them went wherever they went.

They were walking a creek, talking about nothing — crushes at school, whatever kids talk about — when something moved above them. A branch was shaking. A squirrel up there was jumping branch to branch, and he missed one. He fell straight down through a tall oak without touching a single branch on the way.

He didn't land in the water. He landed at the edge, on the bank, and he hit it hard, and then he flopped into the creek. He was moving wrong.

David picked him up first. They knew he was hurt and didn't know how to help him, so they decided to take him to something that could — other squirrels. They knew where squirrels were: the big tree in the playground at their elementary school, not far off. They carried him there and set him down at the base of the trunk.

Then they waited and watched. One or two squirrels came about halfway down, looked at him, and went back up. Neither came close.

After a while the boys got bored and went home, agreeing they'd come back to check on him. They did. The next day he was still there, still dead.

He survived the whole fall. It was the edge that got him.

Just A Trace

This one is built on a memory he can barely hold onto.

His biological father gave him a little voice-recorder toy shaped like a microphone — tiny, about the size of an adult finger. It held five or ten seconds, one recording at a time. It could be reset, but then the old recording was gone.

His father recorded himself on it, telling his son he loved him — forever and ever.

That was after the squirrel. And because it was after the squirrel, the boy already knew something he hadn't known before: forever and ever isn't a thing that gets promised. It's a thing that gets tested. If it could happen to the squirrel, it could happen to anybody.

So he decided it wasn't going to happen to him. He was never going to die. He was very sure about that.