serendipitous nostalgia

the other night, j and i went to see a band called moo'd swing at the free times cafe. j's old friend kathy's partner, bob, was playing in the band - he picks a mean banjo, let me tell you - and we had missed them the last time they played the space, and so we went. they're a friendly troupe - played a lot of what i guess i'd call the "good old tunes" - depression era singalongs, 40's swing tunes, the sort of songs that seem to come prepackaged with north american culture... songs you sing in the shower or hum under your breath and don't even know how it was you came to know them.

and in one song - not one of the oldies, but somehow suffused with the same nostalgia - a tom paxton tune called "my pony knows the way" or some such, they did a little riff. interspersed it with a couple of other songs about ponies, one of which was lyle lovett's "if i had a boat." and despite lyle's republican (and by this i mean vs. democrat) proclivities, i've always loved the man's music. so there i was, sitting in the back room of bella's free times, the only non-white kid in the club (and yes, i do notice these things, despite my best intentions not to) and that one nod to lyle - "me upon my pony on my boat" - dumped me right into a memory.

1993. mcgill. this boy i liked from my lit crit class, in the way that i liked boys then - only the quietest ones, the blankest slates upon whom i could load up all my impotent imaginings. i think his name was craig, though how i knew that, i couldn't say, since i don't think he ever talked. he had square shoulders, and he would often be sitting in the alley, that old cafe in the basement of the SUB (aka the Shatner building), in those long afternoons when i would hide out with some friend - astrida, laura, susan, risking a daytime beer, and so demonstrating how adult we were. or wanted to be. i never did talk to that boy, but he introduced me to lyle lovett through his t-shirt - a white concert shirt with 5 small words on it: if i had a boat. and in pre-google curiosity, i somehow found out more about lyle lovett, and picked up a copy of pontiac, and have loved it ever since.

i posted a little while ago about what the body remembers. and while i know my thinking on this is undoubtedly being influenced by all the intro level psych i'm reading on memory, and the attention i'm paying these days to all things neural, i'm constantly amazed and heartened and, in a way, softened by the army of russian dolls that hold our memories. all the people we are and used to be nested in chance lines from a song, in a waft of cologne, in the shape of a person's handwriting.


lyle lovett - if i had a boat