diggin’ up bones

now playing: kate bush, “cloudbusting”

today has been an excellent day for sifting through old crap and finding little surprises amongst the 160GB or so of storage i have scattered amongst various removable hard drives. i found some great stuff.

this picture just kills me…i have this picture, and an unscanned pic of dylan playing the mandolin, hanging on the wall next to the door, right next to the letterbox where i hang my keys. they’re the last thing i see before i leave the house.

i have a very vivid memory that’s thankfully recorded to videotape of jayda wearing this outfit, dancing around the living room to tori amos’ “winter”. i get teary just picturing it in my head. it just kills me.

then, there’s a moment in my parade of hairstyles that always manages to extract a grin at the very least from people who see these old pics…i have to say, though – my generation, at present, has a fraction of the apology material that today’s kids are gonna have. i’d much rather explain a mullet than to somehow try and rationalize my pants hangin’ off my ass with my underwear stickin’ out. just wait. you’ll see.

i’m an incredibly lucky parent. my kids bicker as much as could be expected, i guess, but for the most part jayda and dylan are a unit. i hear stories of siblings that hated each other for their entire childhoods, and to this day i don’t really relate well to my family…we’re from different planets, for pete’s sake. but jayda and dylan, for all their moments of spitefullness and such, are a team.

i’ll never, ever forget this night. i had a gig at the late, lamented fast folk cafe in new york city, and it was a relatively early show, and it was summer, so i brought the kids with me. we were driving across I-78, and dylan looked across at the skyline and asked incredulously, “is that the entire state building?

so we go do the gig…the other guy in the pic is christopher smith, who was then writing for performing songwriter magazine (he’s since moved on to billboard, so i’m told), and then we all go out to dinner…me, the kids, chris, and my manager, matt asbell, and a few other folks from the magazine, including neil fagan). and we’re sitting really close to the door to the ladies’ room. and everytime (no shit, every single time) a woman comes by our table to go to the bathroom, dylans’ eyes and head follow them from the corner of the table to the bathroom door. it was the funniest thing i think i ever saw.

they were lucky enough to have spent time in nyc and remember what the skyline used to look like….they’ve grown up on the road with me. in fact, we were discussing once where in our apartment to put the christmas tree…and i came up with the novel concept that it should be in the room where we all spend the most time…and dylan volunteered, “maybe we should put it in the van….”

time will tell, i guess whether that’s a good thing or not.