This is an excerpt from my first book, Love Songs and Suicide: A Travel Memoir, Romance, and Tragic Musical Comedy. The first section is available for free. If you haven’t read a sample from my book yet, I’d recommend starting with chapter one. The book is also available on Amazon.

 

Chapter 5. Memories (the Morning After)

After our cruise, I don’t remember what bars we visited or what I drank that evening. All I know is that I drank far too much once again.

The next morning my dad started opening cabinets, slamming them shut, obsessively wiping down one surface after another, vacuuming, and generally making me want to kill myself and take him with me around nine o’clock, a little later than usual.

I’m a nocturnal insomniac by nature. He’s an early riser. Since it’s impractical to travel cross-country by night, we adopted a modified version of my father’s schedule, with the wake-up time delayed by an hour or two.

As I embarked on my sixth hangover in the Big Easy, I slipped through a wormhole somehow and then landed on a damned and fiery river. The devil stood by on the shore while thousands upon thousands of charred and mutilated bodies moved through the river’s swift and bone-crushing current. Beneath the sky of red and above the hopeless screams, I sat comfortably aboard the Steamboat Natchez as its sole passenger. The too-white jazz band—my entertainment for eternity—played “Oh When the Saints go Marching in” on an endless loop. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the ship offered nothing but plain mayo on its menu.

After a while I returned to New Orleans from the netherworld, unscathed. Then I rose to my feet, begrudgingly brewed the coffee, and mourned a mass murder. So many perfectly lovely and innocent brain cells had been destroyed—by me, their creator and killer!

Once the coffee took effect and quelled my homicidal urges, I read a few chapters of The Giver, the classic young-adult novel by Lois Lowry. All my middle-school teachers had tragically omitted the title from their reading lists. The book was free, courtesy of the Snohomish County Public Library System and Hoopla, an e-book provider.

In brief, The Giver is a dystopian novel about an insulated community, lacking color, culture, and terrain. A mysterious committee governs everything from the weather to each individual’s occupation. The society has one designated historian, known as the Receiver of Memory.

There’s a scene in The Giver where the title character, who deals exclusively with classified materials and works in isolation, describes the most depleting responsibility of his job. Speaking to his trainee, the future Receiver of Memory, The Giver says, “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”1

I stopped reading and bookmarked the page.

Hungover in New Orleans, I realized I’d been hoarding most of my best stories and recollections, including a story I’d started writing the previous year that recounted the sad and surprising origin of “I Can’t Make You Stay,” a song I wrote while working at the hospital. Perhaps it’s time I share some of my memories, I thought.

I forced myself into action later that afternoon, despite my aching head and body and diminished brain capacity. At four o’clock I caught our RV park’s courtesy bus and headed back to the French Quarter, solo this time, and then set out for Woldenberg Park on the Mississippi River, a place I’d already visited once.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to large bodies of water, oceans especially, but also lakes and rivers with certain intangible characteristics. I’m a nonbeliever. And unlike seemingly every twenty- and thirty-something woman who’s ever done a downward dog, downloaded a meditation app, or read an Elizabeth Gilbert book, I don’t even consider myself “spiritual,” whatever that means. Still, when I gaze upon a dazzling blue sea or larger-than-life river such as the Mississippi or Columbia, I feel, if nothing else, a benevolent force at work.

My dour mood lightened as I observed the whirlwind of activity along the waterfront. There were tourists on phones, babies in strollers, runners on steroids, lovers, drunkards, and transients too. The Crescent City Connection Bridge, one of man’s many responses to the Mississippi, hovered over the water with tenacity and elegance in the distance.

Homely, unwieldy barges traversed the river from the north and the south, all in the name of commerce—a dated, rudimentary form of commerce. In this era of Elon Musk and artificial intelligence and the side-hustle economy, it was refreshing and beautiful to watch those anonymous crews steer their unsightly ships toward distant ports and more prosperous tomorrows.

At the Monument of the Immigrants, which depicts a young family arriving in America from an unspecified foreign land, I reflected on the polarized state of politics in our country.

The crowd dispersed as sundown approached. And that’s when a familiar face emerged from the shadows. “Hey, I know where you got your shoes,” the man said. He sounded weary, like a car salesman introducing himself to a client after ten long hours in the lot.

“We met two days ago,” I reminded him. “You shined my dad’s shoes.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Mine are fine, but thanks anyway.”

“Okay, man.”

“I was impressed. It’s a good gimmick.”

“That’s it,” he said confidently. Then he walked away with his head swiveling, scanning the area for potential customers.

I stood in front of the entrance to Woldenberg Park, savoring my final moments with Ol’ Man River, my new friend. Fittingly, the guy who knew the location of my shoes photobombed my last picture of the day.

 

Next → Chapter 6: American Spirit