On Sunday evenings, I sit on the toilet and play my guitar.
I have the lid down. It's not that pathetic.
It's just that I really love playing my guitar, and I happen also to be not all that good. I can play the usual chords, the stuff of easy harmonies and illicit beach bonfires. In fact, I may be the only guy who has ever strummed Uncle John's Band and still never, ever, been stoned. Note that I mention this fact neither as a badge of honor nor as a confession. It is more a kind of contextual aid.
So, I get my kids into the bathtub, cover them thoroughly with soap, and then I rush to the bedroom to grab my six-string. They are trapped, a truly captive audience. My older daughter is now sufficiently jaded to mount a decent protest, to roll her eyes at my crooning, but she will still occasionally request that I play something by Taylor Swift. My younger one, though, stares at the guitar with wide eyes, her blond curly hair laced with fruity smelling bubbles, and I am grateful for the fact that she'll still with limited objections listen to me play just about anything. Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, and the Itsy Bitsy Spider are welcome sets. (A performer must balance his repertoire with a mixture of personal passion and the wishes of the audience.)
It was in this setting, just last night, that I stumbled like a lost hiker into an old and previously misplaced memory. The chords ringing out, a G here, a C there, and before I could stop myself, I was playing a song that I myself had written for a high school sweetheart more than 20 years ago, rehearsed over and over for her anticipated visit to my bedroom at the end of her freshman year of college.
Now I know why rediscovered structures are sometimes called ruins. Yesterday evening felt like nostalgic polyester, my ears actually blushing purple as I plundered through the lyrics of that old heart-wrecked song. I seemed to be channeling an unholy alliance of Air Supply with James Taylor through the unfortunate lens of suburban, balding sensibility, and I bravely suffered through this memory of my ex-girlfriend sitting on the floor in her tie-die skirt, her wry smile hiding whatever expletives were thought but not uttered. Mercifully, I was lucky enough to recall that she tried her best to stifle an embarrassed giggle or two.
She had met a sculptor in college (I clearly didn't stand a chance) and my song, with lyrics like "you take that missing brick, and it all comes tumbling down" really couldn't compete with a guy who welded scrap metal collected on hikes in the mountains into vaguely sexual representations. Still, like a plane caught in bad turbulence, at that wonderfully hopeful age of 19, I pushed forward through my wooing, even then beginning the transfer of the moment into deeply and increasingly buried ignominious memory.
So, why last night? What made last night different from all other nights? I've sat on the toilet and played my guitar thousands of times. I must have worked hard to suppress this memory, and still out it came, like a gas, like a wide necktie at a fashionable gathering. I suppose we cannot really choose our memories and when they visit, and before interpreting this moment I thought last night that it was most prudent to just go for the ride. There must be other things I've truly, really forgotten, so it follows that there is a reason that this scene made its way to conscious excavation. Could it be my elevated cholesterol (newly discovered), or something more guardedly optimistic? After all, my 3 year old stared and bobbed her head. I think at least she was smitten.
