The Gumboot Café in Roberts Creek feels like a place where conversations never end. Pause a few years, pick up again when someone wanders back through the door. Joe was there. Paul too. Jamie couldn’t make it, which felt strange. Jamie started the whole row of dominoes thirty years ago. Later he sent me photographs of me playing in this very room, mid 90s. Thirty years sounds fictional until someone produces evidence. Those pictures like viewing a stranger, even though technically it is the same person in my mirror. The room was full. Not politely full. People squeezing in corners, leaning against walls. After the show a seventy-nine-year-old man asked how much it would cost to hire me for a private party next month. He said don’t be shy. I wasn’t sure what he meant at first but ok, I sent him the price of performing and taking an airplane and getting a hotel room and a rental car. Seems our correspondence is over.

The show began with songs wandering into stories. Stories wandering into other stories. Laughter came easily. Then, occasionally, tears, which is always a surprise and in a way the highest compliment. At one point I saw a woman in the audience who looked exactly like my old friend Charlotte. Without thinking I greeted her from the stage as though she were Charlotte. There was a moment of silence while my brain caught up with my eyes. She was not Charlotte. The woman smiled in the way people do when they have accidentally stepped into someone else’s memory. She seemed both flattered and embarrassed that I had mistaken her for someone close. I apologized. She nodded kindly, as if this sort of thing happened to her all the time.

We imagine our lives as a straight road. But they are more like a sand dial. The grains falling, and sometimes you look up and realize you’re standing in the same room again, only everyone has moved a little further down the glass. At the end of the night people lingered the way people linger in Roberts Creek, as though leaving would interrupt something important. Somewhere in the room was the woman who wasn’t Charlotte. Somewhere else were the ghosts of the people who had sat there thirty years earlier. All of us in the same life, just different places on the sand dial.