A small commemoration, two years on, of the day my trusty Volkswagen Beetle, slug bug blue, was T-boned and totalled. The week or so after impact was mercifully lost to Morpheus, then followed by a crazy quilt of memories distinguishable from hallucinations only in retrospective, logical cross-examination (hallucination: reading a magazine, whose staples leap out to implant themselves as stapled sutures bisecting my abdomen; hallucination: my hospital bed transported to a Chicago El platform; not a hallucination: the young doctor on morning rounds a dead ringer for Zach Braff in Scrubs). Good and kind nurses and doctors (and, perhaps, the second-hand effects of cultivating lots of Eupatorium/boneset in my garden) healed all things broken quicker and better than I could have ever hoped.
The Beetle's in an auto graveyard somewhere, too smashed-up in the collision to allow retrieval of its CD cartridge, which held: Joni Mitchell, Hejira, Tobias Werner, Bach Cello Suites, The Kinks, The Kink Kronikles, John O'Conor, Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Vol. 7, and Alison Moyet, Voice. I don't think it was playing at the time of the crash, but I remember playing Voice pretty much incessantly in the days and weeks beforehand. So much to love in Alison Moyet's articulate and heartfelt Purcell ("Dido's Lament"), Jacques Brel ("La Chanson des Vieux Amants"), Michel Legrand ("What are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?"), and an utterly perfect "Cry Me a River" (first pass, mocking; second pass, wistful). The penultimate cut on Voice is "Bye Bye Blackbird," a song (in its Miles Davis rendition) played at my father's funeral. Maybe it will be played someday at mine, too, but not just yet.