What Are Memories Worth?

I've been packing for my upcoming move and I've thrown out a lot of things. Over the years I've moved many times and I've gone through the sorting process each time, so this is a pretty easy move. Still, I'm surprised at what I thought I needed to hang on to. Maybe it was that I was too physically tired to sort through a box or maybe I was too mentally fatigued to shift an item from the storage shelves in my brain. Do you have these?

I Had This

This Might Come Back

This Is Over

Having a garbage chute in my building helps. I can walk a bag of trash down the hall and send it 4 floors away to a steaming pile of hot Houston summer never-look-back. When it's gone, it's gone.

The pleasant and happy happening is that the photographs of my Mom and Dad haven't been painful to come upon. I've had a lot of smiles to find pictures of them as the (at times) youthful, silly, optimistic, attractive, career-minded, flamboyant, outgoing, charismatic, loving, generous, shy, and beautiful people they were. It's a good thing to be able to put all of these pictures together and have a goal of distributing albums to the family.

It's a goal - it could happen. I once heard that goals are healthy, kind of like oat bran.

I also found a lot of ticket stubs and playbills. I always figured they would stir memories of the night, the music, the experience. I've had "Kathmandu" by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band running through my head since coming upon that shoebox. Look at the picture and notice that I didn't find my ticket from that night. No Aerosmith or Todd Rundgren. Nothing from ZZ Top or Peter Frampton. Those are the concerts I remember the best.

If I close my eyes I am standing in front of the stage at Frampton and I am in the presence of a genius but I don't have the capacity to describe it because I'm a very young girl and all I know is his music is blowing me away.

I can remember how still a very full concert hall became when Todd Rundgren climbed to the top of a giant speaker and sang "Hello It's Me". That was after Head East opened for him. We had been whipped into a teenage frenzy with "Never Been Any Reason" and then Rundgren looked us all in the eyes and sang to us, individually, and we were still and we listened.

So I don't have those paper memories but it's interesting to look at the ones I do. Check out the prices on those tickets from back then. Styx and America each set me back six-fifty. Black Oak Arkansas cost me five bucks. Lynyrd Skynyrd, seven dollars. Compare that to what we're paying for concerts today. That Van Halen ticket cost thirty times the price I paid to see Kansas. Sure, Van Halen was great. Sure it was with David Lee Roth and not Sammy Hagar. Guess which I'd rather do again?





©Michelle Scofield, June 18, 2011 All Rights Reserved