Not long ago, my fiancée and I helped my sister pack up her belongings and move into a new house. My sister hates packing — it gives her the rabbit-in-the-headlights panic that makes anything difficult, especially when you’re also juggling childcare, transferring utilities, signing leases, balancing a job, and all of those other little delights that come with moving. So, since Sydnie, my fiancée, has a particular flair for organization and I don’t really feel strongly about packing one way or the other, we helped out in that arena. It’s just part of what family does.
In the process, I rediscovered a handful of mementos from our youth. My sister has held onto a few things — Grannie’s special colander for making jelly and jam, a sweatshirt from Catalina Island, old books and T-shirts, and other assorted items. It was an interesting exercise in memory.
These days, remembering anything before March 2020 or, for that matter, November 2016 seems like trying to vividly conjure memories of a different universe. So much has changed, and for at least the first year and a half of the pandemic, time seemed to take on an odd immeasurable quality. I’m sure my job plays some part in it, too — on any given day I might work on projects with deadlines that afternoon, next week, and next month. It can be a bit tough to keep track. (Allow me to take this opportunity to say I’m sorry if I missed your birthday, friends and family.)
Maybe that’s why packing my sister’s possessions had such an effect on me and why Sydnie and I ended up looking through an old notebook of mine last weekend. We were trying to find some tome hidden in one of our bookcases when she spotted a folder designed to hold yellow legal pads. She asked what it was, I said it probably held unused song lyrics, and then nothing would do except to go through and unpack each half-finished sketch of a song. It was like our own private Get Back, except not for the most famous band in the world.
Some people keep journals; some people keep diaries — I’ve never been able to tell the difference. There are scrapbookers and compulsive photo-takers. I have several notebooks’ worth of almost-songs. Most of them aren’t worth looking at. There’s a reason they were never finished, or they’re an odd archipelago of one-liners, nothing coherent enough to tell a story.
Then there are the songs I cannibalized to finish other songs.
“Hey, this chorus would make a third verse for that tune I can’t seem to finish.” Or maybe the two tunes with suspiciously similar themes meld together, and like alchemy, a collection of chorus-less verses begets a fully fleshed out song with verses, chorus, and a bridge. Work smart, not hard, as the old pros always say.
And there were the silly songs. The things I heard a friend or bandmate or stranger say and just had to write down. “Curse These Metal Hands” is a great title, but the lyrics, such as they are, should remain forever locked away in my memory — or on a well-used yellow legal pad.
Among all that were the little snapshots of life, often bolstered by poetic license and imagination. In songs, if not in newspaper columns, getting the rhyme and rhythm is more important than total adherence to fact. Still, there were lyrics about Syd’s and my first date, about holidays spent working and missing family, about someone who got a new dog (that one has the ring of truth, in my mind, though I can’t remember the actual event it references). So it was fun, if a bit nerve-racking (as I said, most of these unfinished sketches didn’t become actual songs for a reason), to share these memories with someone. Syd caught glimpses of my life before we met, when we first began dating. She saw both clumsy and careful attempts to make a rhyme. Times I stuck the landing and times I slipped off the balance beam, fell down the stairs, and landed in an arrhythmic heap on the floor.
Does that time spent reminiscing and puzzling out meaning deserve a column in the paper? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just trying to capture it for some future me. Maybe I hope I can give the reader a chance to pause, take stock of the slow slip of time in a world that, at present, feels stuck in fast-forward. Maybe it’s as simple as wishing I could jog a happy memory for someone else.
In the end, who knows? All I can say is, whatever feat of storytelling I’m attempting, I hope I stick the landing.