He said to me, “You know, I saw a woman perform once—I forget her name just now—and she had the greatest knack for what to say onstage between songs. She just talked about what happened that day. Things she’d seen or had happen to her. That was it. Of course it takes a sharp wit to turn mundane travel stuff into a story worth telling, but it really worked. And it was fresh, not the same material over and over. Always something rooted in that specific time and place.”
So I took up collecting. There’s a distance between experience and narrative, and it lies fallow if you don’t think about it; that’s how I’d been traveling for the past couple of years, living each day as it scrolled by, not really wondering what it meant or how it might be told to another. But he had a point. It’s a rare and lucky life, this drawing of zigzag lines across the land, and there are all kinds of stories I could tell. Anyway, there are only so many times I can do The-Tower-is-for-my-college-roommate or here’s-my-quasi-happy-song-Harbor before I get tired of hearing myself.
I didn’t quite get the hang of it until the end of the trip, so the audience in Dallas heard all two weeks’ worth in one evening. Lullabye went to the Girls Enjoying Math and Science club in Birmingham, who showed up en masse with chaperone moms and sold my CDs like Girl Scout cookies. Green Island Serenade went to the Sudanese ladies at the Darfur rally in DC, who waited with me for the metro and taught me the difference between kayf halak? and kayf halik? The rotund, sweaty man at the Atlanta Waltz Society, who had me absolutely smitten twenty seconds into a cross-step, got Between. Annapolis and its naval academy (the cadets’ faces startlingly young) got Harbor, for obvious reasons. And New Orleans, Cafe Du Monde open again for beignets, the trio playing the sidewalk circuit at dusk, but moving out of town soon (“it’s just too hard to make it work here”), and the stark white HELP still scrawled on an crumbling roof near I-10—for them I did Passage. Let there be apples on the little tree next year, please, let the lover fall in love anew. It won’t ever be the same, but it can be good again.