The Keeper Of Time

Letting go ... it's a process

We’re in fixing up mode and also letting go of stuff as Eric and I work towards getting this house ready to sell. All the things we never got around to doing to the place because of lack of time, money or interest are now happening in a whirlwind: a renovated bathroom upstairs with a shower, instead of the rustic old relic that we made do with for over twelve years; fresh trim on doorways and window frames, a painted front door. We’ve loved this house and hated it too, as you do - too many creative decisions to make in other areas of our lives: songs, albums, writing, touring, artwork - you deal with what’s right in front of you in terms of work while the things that are literally right in front of you every day are seen as if through cloudy plexiglass: all the home possibilities you can’t quite get to. I had visions of the perfect front door for years, even found a company in Texas that makes them but of course it costs a fortune and how long are we really going to live in this house and - well you get the idea.

Eric and I are both the peripatetic type. I’ve loved being settled for as long as we have, what a miracle to be able to answer “Yes!” when a doctor’s office or some official asks “still at the same address?” I practically shout it, happy to be that stable, that predictable for once in my life. But the thought of being in a “forever home” freaks me out. I always want to believe there’s another choice, another chapter. Even though I know from years of experience how disorienting it can be to shift your life to another place, another state, another continent, I haven’t run out of the hope and curiosity it takes to make such a move yet again. How many more times? I can’t think about that now.

What I can concentrate on is what I’m ready to let go of. A few weeks ago, I filled a trash bag with the last five years’ worth of journals, intending to take them to the dump. I was surprised when Eric asked me if I was sure I wanted to let them go. Finishing my first book; starting my second; the pandemic, and last years of my dad’s life are all in those books. After a few days, I fished them out of the bag and put them back on the shelf. I know they’re going to go in the trash but…not yet.

I’ve been taking loads of clothes and cute items and books and discs I can live without to donate to Goodwill. There are things I’ve dragged with me for decades and Covid-era clothing mistakes too. It feels good to let them go. Of course there’s a tub of treasures my daughter calls “The Permanent Collection” I can’t part with. Stuff like the coat I wore on the cover of my first solo album. It went from me to Hazel and back again, I even resurrected it to wear for photos when I put that album out on vinyl…7 years ago! My arms barely go into the sleeves now. But…Permanent Collection.

The other day I went through my stack of old fabrics and I found myself ready to let go of all the country calico and western themed stuff. I knew that I just didn’t want those kind of prints any more. I’d loved them and used them for curtains and tablecloths and felt like they’d done their time —thank you thank you for your service! A friend in Hudson is a fabric artist and it felt so good to pass those prints on to him. As I’d loaded them in the car, I kept pulling bits out of the bag “this one can’t go…too soon…not yet.” How much space does fabric take up anyway? But giving most of them to someone who’ll work it into their art felt symbolic. I wanted them to have a life and it felt almost selfish to just keep them in a stingy pile to paw through every now and then: “Mine, all mine!” a sad Miss Havisham kind of scenario remembering past glories, and never wases, that bandanna that might’ve been on a stage back in the 80’s, those ruffled curtains around a window looking out into an airshaft in another life, in a different place and century.

Bit by bit I’ve said goodbye to my dad’s stuff. My brother Michael organized giving away most of our father’s furniture to the nice people who worked at his Assisted Living in Queens before we moved him into a nursing home, and it felt good to make them happy after what he put a lot of them through. His clothes mostly went to Goodwill except for a winter scarf that rides around in the backseat of my car, I just can’t seem to take it out of there. The power of stuff. As long as this length of brown, beige and cream acrylic rides around with me, well I haven’t really said goodbye all the way. (Hope the scarf enjoyed those 48 hours of Barbra Streisand’s autobiography on Audible—my dad always did have a thing for Babs.)

The same goes for my father’s watch. I am the keeper of time: my dad’s watch, my mother’s watch and two of Eric’s mother’s watches. I feel sort of like a bandit, a plunderer. I didn’t go out of my way to hold onto these things, but I’ve ended up with them. They feel so personal, like people I loved are right here with me when I take them out of the dresser drawer and hold them in my hand. I wouldn’t know how to get rid of them anyway. Who wears a watch anymore? My dad’s is big and clunky and the ladies watches are tiny, so small I can’t even read the faces. The watches must stay, but the dresser will have to go. Do you know anyone who wants a sleek, wide, midcentury dresser? It comes with a cute early fifties Cape Cod house attached.

We went to see Lenny Kaye read from his new book Lightning Striking last weekend at a nearby venue in an old church. He also told some stories and played songs. I’ve known him since the Shams days, sometimes we called him the fourth Sham because he’d get up and play guitar with us and he produced our album Quilt. I recorded his song The Things You Leave Behind after I heard him play it at Robert Quine’s memorial, back in 2004. Of course he did it at this recent show, Lenny with his long silver hair and cool shirt, still the doctor of rock at 77. That song like all classics seems to get truer and truer as the years go by. More than my share of moves and storage spaces has always made me relate to the song from a “stuff” perspective, because every time you move, you confront the actual weight of your memories.  But it’s different packing this time. I used to just dutifully box it all up:  the books, the clothes and tea pots and dishes and fabrics and on and on; packed and stowed, or shipped to the next outpost of this thing that’s added up to be my life.

Am I curating my stuff now as much for what I want to leave behind when I’m gone? What do we really need, to feel like ourselves while we’re still here? What about our kids, if we have them? I remember my Dad calling us all to our childhood home when he was moving himself and my mom to a senior living place. “Take what you want,” he said. “The rest is getting dumped.” YOU CAN’T DO THIS! I wanted to scream. I expected him to be the keeper of my early life forever. I was forty, still blithely unaware of how lucky I was to have the stability of that beloved family home for four decades. I’m thankful my dad left very little behind in the way of ephemera or heirlooms for us to have to sift through and dispose of when he left this world. Friends have entire houseloads to bag up or pass on. Eric and I did with his mother, though he’d helped her move a few times over the years and moving really does tend to narrow it down. Do you want your pain at the front or the back end of mortality?

I haven’t even mentioned the business side of our stuff: the tools like guitars, amps, keyboards, mics and stands. Archives: demo cassettes, CDs, even DAT tapes, means of recording: 4 track, tape recorders. Boxes of multitrack tapes going back to the 80s. Discs and discs of friends’ work. Boxes of our own LPs and CDs - merchandise. Screenprinting workshop. Tubs of press clippings going back decades, held onto for…what? Who’s going to look at this stuff ever again? Laminates from every festival I ever played, posters. Photos, so many photos. Lyrics, reams of them. Set lists written by hand, that I can never bring myself to throw away, as the perfect one might have existed one night…was it back in…2009 or was it 2019 or maybe last month?

Better not think about any of that just yet. There’s this doorframe that needs painting, and it’s so simple and clear how to do that. Brush on the satin finish called “Aged White” and it’ll look almost like nobody ever lived in this place at all.