KCGB Blog Post #1

The Boy from the Porch tells the story of when the world-famous musician, Kurt Cobain, came to visit my mom in the months preceding her death, three years after he took his own life. Mom knew very little about his legend leading up to her death, not much more than he was from our hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. But the truth was that she was dying of cancer in the spring of 1997. It became her mission to figure out who was coming to visit her. Who was this young man with blue eyes? She began to believe it might have been a boy she had helped eleven years ago. The one she was now remembering as, The Boy from the Porch.

In the month before Mom passed away, she willed herself out of bed, drove to Seattle, met with my brother Old Timer, and asked if he knew of any interaction our family may have had with the famous music kid from our hometown. She never mentions Kurt by name, so he never understood what mom is talking about, but It would make sense later. She had the same conversation with her youngest son John in Olympia, and he was as confused as his brother. As it was, neither brother spoke to the other about Mom’s surprise visit until five years after she died. Hence this was a mystery. It was 2007 before they concluded the Boy From The Porch, the one Mom was talking about was Kurt Cobain. In a way, this was fortunate for my family. Had we known this story twenty years before, it would have been just another famous Nirvana story at the height of Kurt’s postmortem fame. Had we told the story then, you would have had no interest in learning about my mom.