Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

982 What Are We Going To Do

What Are We Going To Do

Time both slows down and speeds up when you're not doing a lot. When every day is the same, they seem to take forever, and yet because they leave little impression, thinking back on it you can't tell how much time has gone by.

Which is another way to say I don't know how long it was after Christmas when we got news of Jordan's memorial service. Two weeks? Three? Those are my guesses.

Carynne and Bart both called on the same day. Bart said he was going to make the trip down from Boston for it. No church service or anything like that. Word was that his family had him buried somewhere in Pennsylvania. It had taken a while for his friends to get a memorial in the city together for him partly because they were trying to tie it to some kind of anti-drug charity and partly because, well, Jordan was the one who would have normally pulled something together like that.

"Are you going to come?" Bart asked.

I was on the phone in our motel room, freshly showered and still in my underwear, because I hadn't yet figured out what I had that was clean enough to put on. Laundry was on the agenda. Ziggy was already at breakfast, probably picking apart a blueberry muffin while dishing with dishy Ricky. (Or maybe that was one of the days Ricky wasn't there. But I probably wasn't thinking about that.)

"Is it worth it for me to go all the way there just to come right back?"

"You don't have any other business to do in the city?"

"Not right at the moment." What I really needed to do was go back to Boston and check in with my various therapists, both physical and mental, but a trip there didn't seem likely in the near future. "In fact I'm avoiding my voice coach."

"I'm sure your voice is fine," Bart said. "It's not like you're about to debut at the Met."

"Yeah."

He tried to talk me into going a couple of different ways. I remained unconvinced. I eventually got dressed and went down to the breakfast room at the motel. Ziggy was there reading the newspaper.

"Where's Claire?" I asked him.

"She took a muffin back to her room," he said. "You okay? You look down."

I looked down at my high tops and back up at him. That was as close to a joke as I could get, so maybe he was right and I was a bit down. "They set a date for Jordan's memorial."

"Oh? When?"

"This weekend."

"Nothing like short notice...?" He sipped from a plain white institutional mug. "Although I guess it's taken them long enough."

I told him what Bart had told me about the charity and the family and so on. "Jeez. I wonder what's happening with all the stuff in his loft." I felt a shiver of ice water down my back as I thought about all the recordings. Jordan had tapes upon tapes upon tapes of musicians like me, performances and sessions that he had captured to use later, like paint he could spread on a musical canvas. All of that was probably going to be lost forever.

Yeah, no wonder I looked down.

Ziggy asked, "Will Carynne set up flights for both of us? Or...?"

I had a moment of brain freeze and I don't mean the 7-11 Slurpee kind. What came out of my mouth was, "I don't think I should go."

Ziggy blinked at me, maybe having a moment of brain freeze of his own. "What? Why?"

It was obvious to me that leaving my mother on her own was not something that would/could/should happen. That it wasn't obvious to him had created a communication gap that I couldn't figure out how to cross. It made me somewhat annoyed with him. "Don't be ridiculous."