Essays

I had heard from my Memphis connection that Chilton was playing guitar in The Panther Burns, a rockabilly band led by singer Tav Falco. It seemed to me that the man who had written and sung Big Star’s “Kanga Roo,” “The Ballad of El Goodo,” “September Gurls,” “Daisy Glaze,” and “Thirteen” — famous songs now but virtually unknown in 1980 — surely couldn’t be moving among us in any known or normal form.

Last year, we were entertaining a visiting Nashville couple at a gorgeous, candlelit jazz bar in downtown Bangkok, where we have lived for eight years, when the man — a powerful, intelligent, and well-respected friend of ours — leaned across the table, clicked his gin and tonic against my husband’s glass and said, “Curt, you’ve given your family such a wonderful life.” This man is progressive, thoughtful, funny, someone I admire deeply. But his words landed like a gut punch.

She would mute the television, and together we would say the prayers and responses of the Rite before I served her communion. I remember us always looking directly into each other’s eyes at that moment, bonded not only as mother and son-in-law, but in our faith.

“I want to go home,” I say to my husband. What I mean is I want to age backwards to 6, to sled with my mother in the parking lot of Joyce Kilmer school outside Boston. I want to relive age 25, to play penny-ante poker with my father in his rent-controlled, bachelor shoebox in Revere, with the sea slapping shore down the street. But Mom died two years after tobogganing, when I was 8, and Dad drew his last flush a year after I turned 40. There is no going home.

My Nashville adolescence was a time adrift without any clear idea of who or what I wanted to be. The people around me in public high school all seemed like people I wouldn’t want to become, and they seemed to view me in the same light. I worried a lot about what kind of life I should aspire to.