Meghan Muses Memorably…

Meghan Coffee’s new album, Songs To Sail By, will be available June 19th, the day of her album release concert at Smith’s Old Bar in Atlanta.  You can buy your tickets here.

 

…or something like that. It might not be memorable, this could turn out to be incredibly dull. I’m a sucker for alliteration, however, thus the title.

 

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Meghan Coffee and I am fond of almond joys, red lipstick, laughing loudly (preferably at appropriate times) and the smell of old books. I am a lucky girl in that Dan Hannon and Danny Stephens like me and my music. I’ve got a picture up there somewhere, a pale freckle-faced girl with flowers in my hair.

 

Let’s see…now that I’ve been let into this OneAtlanta Music blog what shall I write about?

 

I am in the mood to put together a puzzle. I am in the mood to go roller-skating. I am in the mood to unabashedly roll down a hill. I am in a mood. I want to run fast and faster and catch up to my 8 year old self.

 

Ah, and now writing that has brought to mind a memory…

 

The summer I was eight years old was the summer I ran away pretty much every night. Well…It might’ve been just one week that I tried to run away, but to my eight year old self it felt like the whole summer. During the day I would sneak food (yogurt, granola bars, hot dogs, bread) and then after I went to “bed” I would grab my little pathetic pile of bedsheets, matches, books and secreted food and carefully make my way down the outside staircase of my house.

 

The house we lived in (in Decatur) used to be 2 apartments, a top floor and a bottom floor. So, we had an outside staircase leading up to the old entrance of what used to be an apartment. That upstairs of our house was where my sister, Erin, and I had our domain. The laundry room was there and a big play area and a cool closet that began in my sister’s room and ran the whole length of the upstairs.

 

Anyway, I digress.

 

I would sneak down said stairs and take off for the park which was just down the street, cross over the baseball field and down into a culvert or drainage ditch of sorts. It was shaped like the bottom half of a stop sign (the actual name of the shape escapes me now, that’s sad…) and it was completely concrete. At one point in this culvert a tree had fallen over and had been made magical with undergrowth and vines of which formed a glorious canopy, a fairy world. To this little piece of twilight perfection I would run.

 

I’d set up camp. Out would spread my sheets, blazing would be my tiny fire, devoured would be my “rations” (always were they called rations, never food. Sometimes they were “grub” if I was feeling particularly saucy) and I would just be settling into my book of choice when I’d hear my father’s step and his voice from the baseball field. Everytime. And everytime I would be so exasperated! Why wouldn’t they just this once let me spend the night!

 

One time in my father’s demands to “hurry up!” I lost my book, Little Women, in the leaves and in the darkness and all my flustering about. It was gone. I cried because I had just arrived at the point where Beth was dying and I had to wait for 2 days until I could get a copy from the library. Sheer torture.

 

My nightly escapades all ended when my parents told me the next time I ran away they were going to call the police and have them take me to the juvenile jail. (They most likely wouldn’t have but they were TRYING to knock some sense into me…) That almost wasn’t sufficient warning, but Erin, my sensible younger sister convinced me that my bed was better than any old bed that kids might’ve peed on and that I might get beaten up. This caused me to resign my grandiose ideas of a fairy filled sleepover in an old, but lovely, drainage culvert.

 

I still fondly remember the fire-lightning-fly-bugs and the smell of my fire and my sense of being in my own space in the world. It was my place. My own piece of just rightness.

 

I went back there today. The park people probably long ago cut the tree and the fairy vines down, cleared away the pieces. I wonder if they might have happened upon traces of a fire, a granola bar wrapper or two, maybe my book, weathered and worn. They cleared away my past, my place, my piece. I sat where it would have been, pondered my aging, pondered my little girl personhood.

 

I was probably pretty annoying. But cute. I still get called cute.

 

Grrrr.

 

I’m off to tuck my soon to be eight year old boy into bed.

 

“What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.” ~Cynthia Ozick