This has nothing to do with music, but it’s a good story.
I met my first serious girlfriend in my 20s. Let’s call her the Ex-Ex-Ex-Pat, because, well, she is, and because EEEP is the noise I make when I think about the hash we made of the relationship. I adored EEEP very much, but she and I were frankly terrible for each other, and I think we knew it, but, like ya do when you’re in your 20s, we each responded to this problem in mutually dysfunctional ways.
So we were intermittently miserable to each other for about three or four years, and then we crashed and burned, and then spent the next year squabbling about why we broke up. And in the midst of this contentious, preposterous autopsy, EEEP moved to Mexico (that’s the first E, or the third, depending on how you’re counting), and, in a remarkably thoughtful gesture, sent me a gift: a hand-made shoulder bag.
Now, this immediately presented a problem, because my personal crap transport of choice at the time was a well-abused Boy Scout backpack, which I carried every single day. This was in spite of the fact that I’d never been a Boy Scout, since my view of authority has always ranged from louche impatience to outright contempt, and, as I believe we’ve previously discussed, my idea of the great outdoors is being more than fifteen feet from an electrical outlet. Nevertheless, I was deeply committed to my Boy Scout backpack, and besides, boys didn’t carry purses. Girls carry purses. Boys carry backpacks. Or so I reasoned at the time.
I still don’t know why EEEP sent me that bag – maybe she had a brief attack of sentimentality, or maybe she was trying to win whatever argument we were still having. And I don’t know why I started carrying it – maybe I wanted to continue to remember her fondly, or maybe I felt that the gesture deserved some courtesy. But carry it I did, and I fell in love with it. The Boy Scout backpack worked its way to the back of the closet, and then to the landfill. And, like everything else I own, I beat the hell out of this bag (just ask my guitar, It Which Must Be Percussed). And so, in spite of how well it was made, the strap would break, or a seam would fray, and the now-beloved bag would require some attention.
Enter Art Apinian. Art owned a shoe repair shop in the tiny pedestrian mall behind the post office in Davis Square in Somerville. Art was a shoe magician, but more important, he was an absolute character; he’d been a mechanical engineer in his native Armenia, and survived the great Armenian earthquake of 1988, and what he lacked in teeth and English grammar he made up in charm. He was the only person I’d ever met who made me wish I spoke Armenian. So naturally, I asked him to take care of my beloved bag, and he did, faithfully, for many, many years.
But a couple years ago, I took some shoes in to Art, and he didn’t look so great. He looked haggard, and tired, and he’d lost a lot of weight. And I feared the worst – stupid cancer – and I was right. Art had worked like a dog his entire life, and he died before he could enjoy his retirement. May he rest in peace; he sure as hell earned it.
I’ve carried my bag just about every day for 22 years. Today, its shoulder strap hangs by a thread. And I have nowhere to take it to get it repaired. But it, like Art, has served me well, and has earned its retirement, and EEEP and I have made our peace. So I’ve bought a new bag, and it’s waiting, patiently, like my backup guitar, for its opportunity to make me love it. And someday soon, I’ll be walking along, and the strap on EEEP’s bag will give way for the last time, and scatter my crap all over the sidewalk, and I’ll gather it all up and carry it home awkwardly under my arm, and give the bag a decent burial. Because it’s sure as hell earned it.
We humans accumulate a lot of stuff. Some of it we carry. And some of it carries us.