Past Imperfect

It's the time of year when I start interviewing prospective Freshmen for my alma mater.  As I get older, the age gap grows.  I am aware that turning the 'page' of another year means a great deal more when you're 17.  

I just came uptown from the last 2023 gig on a crowded 6 train. There were two very young couples next to me-- at that age where kids are 'turning' from young teens to old teens-- hormones raging, and they've not quite mastered their 'personae'.  Maybe their first time out without chaperones... it made me a little more sympathetic to these eager students that try so hard to make themselves memorable in a one-hour conversation-- on the brink of so many things, these kids.

We musicians so often worked on New Year's Eves...  were paid decent money for the most part to celebrate with packed rooms of drunk customers.  We made them dance, forget their problems... and by the time we packed up and went home, the page had already turned for us.  We didn't have to plan, consider, arrange... and then suffer the disappointments and hangovers that plague so many partiers on this night. 

Tonight I miss my mother-- her well-wishes for her children, our annual ritual of the last call of the year.  And the ones I've crossed off my list-- each December we take inventory and find more names in the 'missing' column. Most of the 21st century parties were all about Alan Merrill-- the ultimate singer of classics, R&B-- a partying and soulful bandmate whose Pogues-esque version of Auld Lang Syne was incomparable and now, besides YouTube clips, a thing of memory only. 

One of the kids I interviewed told me he's writing his autobiography. At 17, I can't imagine how this will end... or if it will... and then I remember Jackson Browne's 'These Days' written at 15 or 16... and think again about judging the wisdom of a teenager.

I've seen New Year's Eve fireworks and sunrises in tropical countries-- the Northern Lights from an airplane and heard revelers from inside the walls of a hospital Emergency Room with a sick child. When I was in the 6th grade, I got to sleep over in the attic room of the Hoffmann family behind our house.  Three sisters and I blanketed in a double bed beneath a skylight where the winter starlight seemed to promise us every possible miracle.  I had a crush on a Judge's son who'd gone to Las Vegas for Christmas and brought me a matchbook signed by Frank Sinatra.  We giggled and confessed and the night air in those days smelled crisp and starry with the faintest hint of woodsmoke and hot chocolate.

Teenagers were always inclined to keep diaries-- journals-- a place to confide one's dreams and safely keep secrets.  It was useful-- especially during those difficult weepy nights when we'd page back and reassure ourselves we could survive our sorrows and failures. Lists were equally useful-- things we needed, songs we loved, boys (in descending order), books, TV shows, movies, bands. 

The internet has disturbed the quiet solace of diaries; it also affects memory.  My son often forgets his preschool teachers or friends; I remember all of this-- not just mine but his-- although there is surely coming a day when I won't. 

It occurred to me today the blessing of this night is memory-- the lists and sequences and growing pile of these through which I can leaf and uncover... the sadnesses and joys, the popping cork injuries and the mistakes-- the bad weather and the bandstands... the tuxedos and dresses, the masked balls and the sloppy punk dive bars.  The various nights that were, that weren't, that have been and should have been-- the past perfect, the pluperfect, and my favorite-- the past imperfect.  That grammatical term for me has always opened doors and windows of poetry-- like the translation of some Proustian chapter or the unclaimed title of my unwritten autobiography-- my life as a reel, as an unedited mass of tangled film... what remains, perhaps, eventually, to be forgotten.