Stuff

Nostalgia is fully kicking in.

We’ve decided to rent a storage unit for at least the duration of Kate’s three year contract for Bangkok. We’ve put some larger furniture items in there that we may want to hold onto if we decide to come back state-side after three years. If we stay overseas, we’ll re-evaluate at that time.

In addition to the larger items are all of the keepsakes and mementos from my life. One of the hardest parts of this process is going through all of these things realizing how much life I’ve lived and trying to sit with those memories for a little while. There is so much random stuff, but it all has meaning to me. And that’s the crux of this whole thing. It’s just stuff. We place so much meaning on stuff.

I have my dad’s calendar he kept that has things scheduled out past the day he died back in 1994. That hits pretty hard. I have the soccer rosters and stats he meticulously kept from the time he coached my youth travel team.

I have my Section V championship patch from Senior Year when I was the starting left fullback on the varsity soccer team and my varsity letter. I have some newspaper clippings and a pamphlet that was put together commemorating the championship.

I have videotapes as well. VHS tapes of the video yearbook from my senior year. I also have the VHS of my Berklee Senior Recital. I’d love to get it converted to digital, but uncertain where or how to do so, especially with so little time before we leave.

Then there are the cassette tapes and minidiscs of countless jam sessions at Berklee as well as gigs I played in New York City with my group. Gigs from the long-gone Detour, which was a great spot in the East Village that hosted some amazing musicians on a regular basis. I was fortunate enough to be able to play there pretty regularly. Some of them are also from Cornelia Street Cafe, another long-gone venue from the West Village, which, for me, was most notable as the place I could see George Garzone whenever he performed in NYC. Most of the minidiscs are unlabeled, unfortunately, so I wouldn’t know exactly when they were recorded or who was at the jam session. I’d love to go back and listen to it all again, but who has time for that? I don’t have time to spend countless hours traveling back in time. A large part of what hits me is regret. Regret I didn’t practice harder or have a bigger drive to pursue music. I put in time, but not like my classmates that are now household names in the jazz community. At the same time, I’d love to hear what I sounded like back then, just out of curiosity.

The most notable item I have, from a personal standpoint, is a recording of a jam session I had the summer after Senior Year of high school in the basement of my friend Sol Shaftel with Jon Gala. Sol would usually play drums and Jon and I would switch off between guitar and bass. My good friend Josh Lawler was our drummer in high school and Sol would play bass, but I think Josh was traveling at the time, which is why he wasn’t around for this. These were just fun times doing our best Jimi Hendrix impressions on guitar. I’d love to hear this tape again, but I have no idea where to find a cassette player at this day and age.

Now I step back, take a breath, and reawaken to my current life. Everything in these boxes has lead me to this moment, about to take a huge leap with my amazing wife and our two boys. These boxes are memories. Fragments of where I come from.

Now it’s time to make some new memories.