51 Monteroy Road in Brighton, NY will be up for sale soon. Crane and crew shall soon be done refinishing the floors and throwing up fresh paint. Bidding farewell to one’s childhood home is classic diary material. We saw the other one go at 11 Water Street not too long ago, both relatively easy milestones in accepting loss. The concise pints of Autobiography Ale are stacked in cases across four rooms now up at #3 Vane St., Newrap, VT; solitude, meet solitunes. The car returned from the final drives laden with archival replenishments.
There’s a set of photos I lifted from the living room stacks, big black & whites of me and my sister romping in a field and jamming on the piano. She’s 16, I’m 13. In a couple, Meg’s on flute, in another I’m stretched out on the floor at the wheels of the Steinway as she sight reads. There’s more elegant china in my kitchen cupboard than I know what to do with. Lacquered match boxes - three sets of wooden sticks beneath one long Netherlands painting - reside here now, and a huge dry set of post cards from 1960s Egypt salvaged from stuff in the garage mine to keep or trash.
The last sessions on that Steinway went well. For my last visit home I focused on playing what I know. Although I did work with switching keys to inbred songs, like a way of proving I was fully warmed up. Anything about to ensue there was no heart in singing dropped unsung. “Rocket Man”, performed while the lawyer and interiors lady chose wall colors, stood out as the most enthralling performance of work by another author. And I wrote a new song.
Savluvvies, must keep you in the dark about the title for now. But you can be sure I wrote extra special clear for all the confident kids out there. Something with a future. The terrified ones too. And for all of us in between. Not the first song of the year, but the last one at my original baby grand, so it has an old familiar SaveLove pulse. Minor, including a bridge with lots of majors. It’s about songs I’ve already written, where they fit into microspace, of who else might sing them. It begins, “Told you before about how not to conform to narcissism ….”
