“Think over your life,” Xavi said, a Marlboro perched between two fingers of one hand while the other used a demitasse spoon to stir so many sugars into espresso that it had become a syrup.  

I sat across from him at a sidewalk cafe in Barcelona thirty years ago, sipping my cappuccino in awe. He had seven years on me, and a couple more continents under his belt. 

We were both travelers back then.  I’d taken the money I had saved to buy myself a baritone sax and used it to get to Argentina.  From there, my girlfriend and I had traveled to Las Cataratas de Iguazú, where I’d met him.  Since that first acquaintance, we’d crossed paths on three different continents.

“Can you remember each moment of your life?”  He asked, the cigarette smoke misting up in front of his face, imbuing him with an air of mystique and wisdom that my 50 year-old-self now finds highly suspect.  

But back then I pinched my twenty-year-old brows together, trying to understand his point.  Could I remember each moment of college, each moment of being on the farm with my mom and dad?

Admittedly, it was all a blur.  But this moment in the cafe, the smell of the espresso, the foam of the cappuccino across my lip, the cigarette, the lost look in his eyes.  These things were very clear.  Very real.

“This is my point, you see?  It is only the travels that stand out.  It is only the travels that make the memories.  The running of the bulls.  Las Cataratas.  A camel ride in the desert.”

In that moment, gazing into his eyes, a part of me was swept up in his wisdom and the glamour of my young adult life, bumming flights around the world, meeting friends, having adventures.  The other part of me was most definitely the woman I was becoming:

How could someone be that unhappy with their daily life as to only feel alive when they travel?

For three years we continued our friendship, a companionship that existed for the adventures, kept alive by letters shipped across the Atlantic.

It all ended when I met Bob.  

The travel seemed a paltry distraction next to the passion that fueled our desire to tackle the great challenges of our lives – building a profitable farm that allowed room for our creative lives; tackling the research for the books I longed to write, raising our daughters and giving them an education.

There was never a single moment in the jungle, or under a giant waterfall, or sitting outside a European cafe that measured up to the collection of days that has built this grand adventure with my husband.

Xavi vanished from my life without a single bit of regret.  

But his question didn’t.  

Because I cannot remember each moment of my life.  Some days, I sit in the woods beside Bob, drinking morning coffee, and try to remember yesterday or the day before…let alone the 2,700 days I homeschooled my children, or the 264 trips to the farmers market before we built the cafe, or the 1,248 Sunday dinners, or the 4,752 breakfasts I’ve cooked in the cafe, or the 4,360 hours I’ve spent writing essays and recording podcasts.  It’s a blur.

And now, with our daughters in college, I am left wondering, how could I have loved it so much, but not be able to remember it?

“Can you remember each moment of your life?”

We’ve tried Xavi’s personal remedy: backpacking across Europe, criss-crossing this country by rail, grilling our way across Argentina.  

It definitely created some memories.  But a lot of that gets lost in the wash of time, too.  

Increasingly, Bob and I find ourselves pondering different excursions, then shrugging our shoulders with detachment.  Really?  Being a tourist in yet another place?

It’s nice.  But it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Last year I took money that we could have used for traveling and used it to buy a bari sax in an effort to recover what I walked away from when I was 18.  

I invest hours into that horn, practicing scales, using jazz licks to try to strengthen my memory.  And just like the homeschooling or the cafe breakfasts, or the book writing, I don’t remember each practice session, or each jazz band rehearsal.  Instead, some practice sessions are infuriating.  But in others, I disappear into the flow.  I can’t remember what, exactly happened, only that I was transported to another place, unaware of time, or of any life problems.  And that brings me back, again and again.  I stay up past my 7pm bedtime on Tuesday nights, eager for practice with the SUNY Cobleskill Jazz ensemble, my only musical outlet with the bari, beside the hours I spend practicing alone here. 

“Hey!”  Kristina Johnson says one week this winter during rehearsal.  “Let’s go play at Chieftans in the spring!”  

Chieftans is a bar on Main Street in Cobleskill.  I can’t imagine how we could cram a 20 piece band in there.  

Kristina is convinced it’s doable.  

I’m convinced it will be a disaster. 

But spring comes and I show up with my horn and set up in the front row.  The room in front of us is completely empty, save for one or two people waiting for us to begin.  I figure they must be friends of band members.  Because, let’s be honest, that’s all who ever shows up for any concert I’m a part of. 

“Hey!”  Kristina says as she shuffles the charts on the stand in front of her.  “Lou says I shouldn’t bother conducting.  We should just do it.”  Lou is Kristina’s partner.  He was my best friend in high school, and he went on to become a professional bass player.  I’m always amazed he still finds time to play in this jazz ensemble, where he and I used to play as teenagers….before I abandoned the bari and took off for Argentina. 

“You have to conduct!”  I look at her, wide-eyed.  She shrugs and counts us off.

We start with Satin Doll.  The music spills up to the front of the bar and out onto the street.  People start wandering in.  

And Kristina wanders away from her music stand.  She’s not there to cue entrances.  She’s not there to coach dynamics.

And I slip into a heightened state of awareness, listening to everyone around me…To what’s happening on the bass in back, with the trumpets and trombones behind me, with the saxes beside me.  We find our groove.  We’re listening to each other, playing as one.

But more than that is happening.  Folks come in with their drinks and sit down together.  There is a communion happening between them and us that I’ve never experienced as a musician.  I hold the bass line with the bari and look out at the way I see the customers’ shoulders relax, as their heads begin to say to the tunes.  I feel as though I’m sponging their cares away with the sounds from my horn.  

I knew other musicians could do this for me, but I never knew I could do this for someone else.  

And I come more and more alive through every tune:  Satin Doll, St. Thomas, Don’t Know Why, Hay Burner…

The soloists take their turns playing out over the room, and it’s a thrill to hold up the notes beneath them, and to let their own twists and turns wash over me, lifting me, purifying me.  

And here I am.  Sitting in a bar in little ol’ Cobleskill;  50 years old, blatting away on a beat-up bari in a back room with 20 other obscure musicians.

And I am as alive and aware as I was standing beneath the falls of Iguazú, as I was walking the streets of Venice, exploring the Algarve, dining on fish from a food truck beside the ocean in Brazil, as I was the moment I sat in that cafe sipping a cappuccino as my fellow traveler leaned across the table and asked:

“Can you remember each moment of your life?”

Maybe not.  

But this.  This.  

I will remember. 

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And that’s a really important thing to do, because all of this— the podcast, the blog, the books and the creative recharging that happens over fall and winter—   are a result of the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Victoria Shelton and Barbara Andrus.  Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you!  Care to learn more about Sap Bush Hollow Farm, visit us here.