Creative Nonfiction

Max Apple could see the signs in his son Sam.

While the two watched Houston Rockets basketball games together, Sam would curl up against his father during the most pivotal moments. Sam did the same thing during dramatic scenes of the British television drama The Jewel in the Crown.

Before jail, my life had a soundtrack.

George Michael poured through my car speakers with the windows down. The Goo Goo Dolls rode shotgun on late-night drives home. Broadway cast albums filled my kitchen while I painted. Concerts were a weekly ritual.

I’m almost 80 years old. And for most of those years, I’ve thought of myself as a drummer. Last week, as I watched their new owner drive away with my drums, I wondered if—without my drums—I could still call myself a drummer. And if I’m not a drummer, who am I?

Perhaps it is the angle of light, turning the beige and gold carpet the same color as the dried grass outside my window that sparks this peculiar déjà vu.

Perhaps it is because that grass gently bends in the breeze, just like the grass did on the Cape Solitude Trail ten years ago on another October day when we were lost, obvious tenderfoots in an alien landscape.

My afternoon shift at Achnacarry has finished and I’m cycling through town along the River Ness to Starbucks, listening to a playlist that Therese has curated. I mouth the line, what the hell, buttercup, get a hobby, because Therese said it’s the best line in the song, and, even though I like the attitude with which the words, give him hell, are delivered, as always, I must defer.