Collapsing Time

What stays with us—My Sunday Best #51

Me and one of my childhood companions, Fa-ying.

Last Sunday, I was driving and sometimes riding in the passenger seat—leaving Nashville and beginning the trek home, which is now Rocky Mount, Missouri. I still get car sick if I try to write or read in the car, so there was no Sunday Best post last week. Plus, I didn’t bring my computer.

My husband Mickey and I moved from Tennessee three years ago this coming April. We didn’t intend to stay. We just wanted to play music, and that wasn’t an option in early 2021 unless we played on our front porch, which we did. We released the album Postcards From the Past during the pandemic, so instead of any live shows, we played the songs unplugged on our acoustic guitars and put a few videos up on YouTube. It was different, a bit anticlimactic after a year of curating a body of work and carefully preparing it for its grand entrance into the world. Maybe it’s like making a float for the Rose Parade, with millions of flowers and tiny details, meticulously placed only to have no parade. I don’t know if it’s an accurate analogy, but that’s what comes to mind.

Truthfully, the best part about making something is the making part. It’s when anything is possible. It’s when I can play with words, melodies, and chord progressions—nothing is set in stone, or PDF, or MP3. It’s when ideas and what-ifs come to me in dreams and when I’m driving. If you happen to be riding along and see me talking to myself or my phone, I’m trying to capture one of those slippery ideas floating by before it disappears.

While I was in Nashville, I recorded six new songs and will record six more in a few months. The result will be a collection of songs, which I am calling an album because I think there is still such a thing. Who would have thought I’d live in a time when I could pull a song out of thin air with a simple command to an invisible being named Alexa or Google?

Aside from spending hours in the recording studio, which I like to think of as my personal Magic Kingdom, I also made the time to see a few friends I hadn’t seen in years. As we drove down familiar streets, everything looked and felt different. The store where I used to work, Scarlett Begonia, now had a big black awning across the front with Begonia written in oversized white block letters. There were no colorful displays in the windows, just big empty glass panes. I already knew Scarlett Begonia was not there, I wrote about it several years ago, but seeing it now brought a few hollow feelings of loss to the surface.

We intended to make a left turn down Elliston Place but missed it—Mickey’s traffic reflexes weren’t quite up to speed—out of practice, I guess. We circled the block to where Rock Block Guitars used to be. It’s now a place to eat chicken wings—no mouth-watering guitars and vintage amps to peer at through the store windows, just big empty glass panes.

However, as we drove around, I realized the things I remembered about these places had nothing to do with the buildings or the structures, it was about the people inside. It was the time we ordered pizza for lunch from that great Italian restaurant down the street. Or when Emmy Lou Harris came into the store and bought an embroidered baby dress from Guatemala. Or the time Hank Williams Jr. showed up at Rock Block early one morning to shoot a video. Another time, when Mickey was working, I got a phone call from his number, and Radney Foster was on the other end, a singer/songwriter I admired. I melted. There were other famous customers, rude customers, and nice customers who became good friends, coworkers, and hundreds of great stories. Then there were all the things we sold, and the things we bought or wished we had or hadn’t, and so much more. “Remember that day…?” is repeated over and over as we reel in the years and bring them into the present moment.

My friend Jack said when we reconnect with old friends, it’s as if time collapses. The idea struck me. I thought about how time is like a structure that appears to separate us through years and distance. But when we connect, no matter how long it’s been, the structures collapse. It’s as if we just saw each other yesterday, picking up conversations mid-sentence, retelling stories, laughing, and remembering.

Recently, a high-school friend of Mickey’s came to one of our shows. It had been over fifty years since they had seen each other. That’s half a century! But when they talked, it was as if they were back in high school. Through the conversation, years of experiences were gathered and distilled, revealing what mattered most and what memories stay—family, friends, and pets being key topics.

As I listened and watched the two of them interact, there was one moment I will never forget. Mickey got out his phone and said, “Have I shown you Dennis’s baby pictures?” Dennis is our one-year-old dog. It was a beautiful moment that ushered in an hour’s worth of conversation and photos of beloved pets, past and present.

Connecting with old friends is one of the beauties of this life. It allows us to put our guards and assumptions down as we remember the shared moments—the awkward skinny kids, all knees and elbows, bumping and rolling through the ups and downs of growing up, and the animals that were right there with us.

Today, I’m still in the thick of creating and arranging the roses on this new album project. I plan on drifting in and out of this place for the next several months as I steal away moments to craft the details.

Here’s a sneak peek of a demo of one of the new songs. It’s titled I Could Dance With You Forever (Helen’s Waltz), inspired by some friends who love to dance. This is the song in its basic structure, before all the beautiful embellishments to come, before the parade. The ending goes on for quite a while because, in the final version, we will fade the ending. ** To listen you have to click the play button twice. The first click takes you to the online site. When you get there, scroll down and click again 😜