Grey hair

And the kindness of strangers

Under fluorescent lights in green room bathrooms, I see deeper lines on my face and bags under my eyes and wonder if I will age as gracefully as my mom.

I wake up in the morning and see a grey curl in Spencer’s hair and it makes my heart jump.

Aging together, with Spencer, with my friends is a privilege I’m reveling in.

I see a sea shell dish full of slivers of soap bars and am reminded of my Nonny. Her bathroom filled with coral.

I think of her hands often. How tightly they would grip mine as a child. How she would rub them together quietly.

I think of her every time I paint my nails and when I hang up the coral towels in my bathroom.

My sister and I do the same thing when we can’t sleep. We walk the halls of places we’ve known in our minds, touching and picking up everything we can remember.

I’m always in my Nonny and Pop Pop’s house. I pick up various perfume bottles. I run down the steep stairs to the basement and sneak into my Pop Pop’s office and run my fingers over the spines of his medical text books. I smell the old dry erase markers they kept out for us to draw with on the white board. I get a Barq’s root beer out of their garage fridge.

On tour we are often in other people’s houses. Their things scattered on surfaces. Paintings on the wall I’ve never seen before. Notes and pictures hung on the fridge. A beautiful museum to walk through.

My favorite part of being on the road is getting glimpses into other lives. We get to drop into towns quickly and see a bar that is a mirror image of our haunts at home. A coffee shop full of locals. I wonder who they are and what it feels like to live on that street.

In D.C., we met a venue employee named Hawk. When the bar was closing we sat with him and he told us about the 1968 riots. How most of the block we were on was burned down. How there was one Jewish shop owner who had been kind to his black neighbors and how they spray painted “soul brother” on his shop to protect it from being torched.

He said, “these aren’t the things you learn in history books”. He said, “these are the things we pass from mouth to mouth.”

When we left, he gave me a big hug and lifted me off my feet. The squeeze itself almost made me cry. But then he said to all of us, “I just made you happy, didn’t I?” And laughed.

He did.

Touring is getting by on the kindness of strangers.

When we come to a city we are walking their streets, sitting on their barstools, and looking in their mirrors.

I see so many beautiful rooms and halls and hope I can walk back through them in my dreams. I hope my friends and I age like Hawk and can tell stories to younger musicians who come through our lives.

I have always thought that writing is a solitary path but becoming a musician has taught me how to exist better with other people. How to learn with others. How to grasp at each other’s hands when we need to.

I can’t wait for my hair to turn grey.