A Little Salt Air Never Hurt Anybody

Stack 25

I flew into Boston last week for a celebration of life. If you read the last post you already knew that I was going, but if you didn’t - now you know. My destination was actually Rhode Island, but Rhode Island’s airport is tiny, and I hate flying enough that I’ll always take the direct flight into Boston and drive down rather than deal with a connection into somewhere smaller. The flights went as expected, with delays and Boston rush hour traffic afterwards. But, what I didn’t expect was for the trip to knock a few things loose in my head that had been sitting quiet for fifteen years.

I hadn’t been back to Rhode Island since I left fifteen years ago. That’s a long time to stay away from a place that used to be home. I never consciously decided to avoid it. Life just kept moving, and the road kept pointing other directions. The time passed. But the second I stepped out of the car after arriving at my hotel in Rhode Island (away from the big city aroma of Boston airports and traffic), something hit me before I even had a chance to think about it. The smell of the earth.

If you’ve never lived in New England, or spent real time there, you might not know what I’m talking about. There’s a smell to that part of the country, damp soil, tall trees, something green and unbothered, that you just don’t get in most of the rest of America anymore. It’s the smell of a place that, aside from Boston, hasn’t been paved over and piped through and sold off in quite the same way. I remembered it instantly, the way you remember a song you haven’t heard in decades the second the first few notes hit. I moved there in 2008. My partner in crime, Mike, was offered a job at his company’s corporate office, and Rhode Island is where we landed. That chapter of my life turned into a lot more than a job relocation. It’s where I fully developed something called The Roy Holliday Show, which deserves its own telling and will get one before too long. That’s all coming. But standing outside that hotel last week, none of that history was on my mind yet. I was just breathing. And relaxing.

Technically, it wasn’t a funeral. It was a celebration of life, and as a basic rule, I knew what that meant. But having lived all over the country, I’m always a little amused by how differently that plays out depending on where you are, and this time was no exception. We greeted the family, took our seats, and waited for whatever presentation was about to start. Except there wasn’t one. The greeting, the mingling, the standing around catching up with people, that was the celebration of life. I probably came off like a bit of a snob for the first hour, sitting there patiently in my seat, waiting for something that was never coming to start, trying to be respectful of an event that had already started without me realizing it. It’s funny to think about now. Once I caught on to the flow of it, it was genuinely great, and honestly, a really nice way to say goodbye to a friend. Afterward there was the usual casual gathering at the house, the kind where people who haven’t seen each other in years end up standing around with plates of food they’re not really eating, drinking adult beverages to fill the nervous gaps, and talking about whatever else comes up. And what came up, more than once, was Texas.

People wanted to know what it’s actually like living in Texas. Not in a nosy way, more in a genuinely curious way, like they’d heard so much noise about it on the news that they weren’t sure how much to believe. I told them the truth. Yes, it really is as batshit crazy as it looks from the outside. Our political circus here is just that, a circus with top billing for the highest bidder. And the bulk of the natives buy right into what they’re sold from the career politicians and their supreme leader in the white house. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and I’ve never been the type to sugarcoat where I live just to make people feel better about the state. It’s a great place to visit, Texas has lots of neat tourist attractions. But I don’t think I would recommend moving here.

What struck me, though, was something smaller and stranger. We were at breakfast the next morning and I noticed flags. There were flags all over the place. In Rhode Island, you can still fly an American flag off your porch and it just means you love your country. It doesn’t mean anything else. Nobody assumes you vote a certain way, watch a certain channel, or believe a certain set of things about who belongs here and who doesn’t. Where I live now, that same flag on that same porch gets read as a statement, and usually a pretty specific one. I hadn’t thought about that difference in years, and it hit me harder than I expected. It was genuinely comforting to remember that there are still corners of this country where a flag is just a flag, where the political temperature hasn’t cooked everything down to a single boiling point. I know New England has its own problems. Every place does. But sitting in that backyard, hearing normal, sane conversation about politics without anyone foaming at the mouth, felt like drinking cold water after a long stretch in the desert. I’d almost forgotten what that felt like.

Saturday night we ended up at a place called Jefferson Speakeasy, and that one hit me in a different way. It was a small, underground vibe of a room - zoot suits and all, standards and old favorites from the piano player, the kind of place where thirty or so people can pack in and somehow feel like a real crowd. Everybody drinking their fruity flaming cocktails, smiling away. I sat there thinking about Roy Holliday, and where he'd be right now if he were still out there doing his thing. This is exactly it. Some tucked-away speakeasy, working a room of thirty people like it was three hundred, playing the standards, watching everybody sip their girl drinks and lose themselves for a couple of hours while he drank along with them. I hadn't thought about Roy in a while, honestly, and it was strange and kind of wonderful to suddenly picture him fully formed, alive and working, in a room I happened to be sitting in.

Anyway, I spent my last day in Newport, which might be one of the more relaxing places to spend an afternoon. We started out at a pub on the water’s edge called Saltwater, I think. It’s been there forever and I’ve honestly never paid much attention to the name. Alger Mitchell was playing out on the deck, giving us a fun time in between everybody screaming at the FIFA final on the TVs. There’s a certain setlist that solo guitarists seem to work through at places like that, the kind of songs you only ever seem to hear in a spot exactly like it. I took it all in and did my best to join the conversation around me, though I should probably mention again that I’m a hermit at heart and don’t feel much of a pull toward small talk with strangers. I was mentally worn out from a full day of chit chat the day before, spent is probably the better word, so it was genuinely nice to just veg out, enjoy the tunes, and get quietly reminded of a past life where I used to be the one up there playing those same songs. I just sat there and let it wash over me, amusing myself here and there by predicting the next song to be played based off of his setups. Some things never change. Anyway, no agenda. No errands. Just salt air and somebody’s guitar drifting across the docks. I hadn’t planned much for that day on purpose. After a funeral type thing, sometimes the best you can do is give yourself permission to just sit and exist for a few hours before you have to fly home and be a functioning adult again.

But what about the food, right? How was the seafood? Right? Well… I’m not a huge seafood person, honestly, but I do love fish and chips on a Friday, the day it’s actually fresh off the boat, and I had some genuinely great fish and chips Friday night. Some funky fish taco thing on Saturday night and more fish and chips on Sunday night. Exciting, huh? What I really found myself craving, and I know how this sounds, was Dunkin’ Donuts. Yes, I know they’re everywhere now, coast to coast, a national chain like any other. But there’s a real difference between the stores up there and the ones down here, and I suspect it comes down to volume. When a store is turning that much product every single day, the coffee gets made right, assuming you order it right, and the donuts are actually fresh instead of sitting under a heat lamp since sunrise. Saturday morning I treated myself to a coffee and a chocolate cake donut, and it was borderline religious. Beyond that, there wasn’t much food I actually missed from my Rhode Island days. My favorite food there was always Italian, the pizza especially, but that’s the one thing I can usually find done right no matter where I land.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. Somewhere between the smell of the earth, the flag conversation, and that afternoon in Newport, a thought crept in that has genuinely never crossed my mind before. What if we moved back?

I want to be clear, this isn’t an announcement. Mike and I haven’t sat down and mapped anything out. We’ve got five dogs, a life, a whole creative operation built around where we currently are. Weatherford isn’t going anywhere and, probably, neither are we, at least not anytime soon. But the fact that the thought even surfaced tells me something. In fifteen years of living in Texas, through all the heat and the politics and the general exhaustion of the place, I had never once let myself imagine going back to New England. Not seriously. Not even as a passing daydream. And it’s not just Rhode Island, either. Lately I’ve caught myself thinking the same thing about Tulsa, my actual hometown, in a way I never used to. Standing outside that hotel last week, both of those thoughts were suddenly on the table at once, for the first time.

I think that’s what a good trip does sometimes. It doesn’t hand you answers. It just knocks something loose that had been sitting still for so long you forgot it could move at all. I’m not planning a U-Haul anytime soon. But I came home with something I didn’t have when I left, a little crack of possibility that hadn’t existed before, and a reminder that home isn’t always the place you’re standing in right now. Sometimes it’s a smell in a parking lot that pulls a whole decade back into focus in about four seconds flat. It was a good trip.

Since getting home, in between catching up with myself, I’ve somehow managed to finish transferring all the old DATs I found into WAV files. For anyone who doesn’t know, DAT stands for Digital Audio Tape, a format that was popular in recording studios through the nineties and basically replaced reel to reel for mastering. There’s also ADAT, which is a different animal entirely, a multi-track version of digital tape that briefly replaced the big old reel to reel machines before the format tanked. Good luck finding anyone who can even handle ADAT tapes these days. I’ve still got a stack of those waiting, and I’ll deal with them later this fall once I’ve fully sorted through everything on the DAT side. But the DAT transfer is done, and there’s some genuinely fun stuff in there. A surprising amount of it actually turned out usable, too. I’ll probably have a track from the VG70 project up on Bandcamp sometime this weekend, and who knows what else surfaces as I keep digging. There was also a good chunk of Frustrated Housewives material on those tapes, which is going to be a real help with the redux project I’ve got going for that band.

Assuming nothing big comes up this week, we’ll get back to memory lane next time. There’s a new partner in crime waiting to be introduced, a band or two, and a moment where I finally had to admit I needed a real job. But I wanted to give this trip its own space first, because it earned it.

I’m curious, if any of you have ever gone back to a place you used to call home after years away, what did it stir up in you? Sometimes the strangest things bring the past rushing back.

Oh well… more road ahead next week. Try to make yours a good one!

Jeff

Audio credits: Intro/Outro music: Intro: Dirty Water by The Standells, Outro: Southern Cross (live) by Jimmy Buffett.

Listen to the "What Was That Song?" playlist, featuring music mentioned on the shows: