Listening to Happy Rhodes tonight, I am instantly thinking about moving to Buffalo to live with the man who would become my ex-husband. I moved out of my parents to move in with him. I was 22. I was born and raised in a small rural town outside of Buffalo, and was excited about the idea of living in the city. We found a one room apartment in a rather nice neighborhood. It was a garage converted into living space. One wall was covered with mirrors from ceiling to floor. The bathroom was tiny and there was an out of tune piano in the “hall” area near the door. We didn’t have a tv, we got “online” by checking mail with Pine, and using his college account to get on IRC. I have a lot of little memories, rather than stories, about the place.

I remember our weekly trips to the library downtown, taking the subway down and coming back with piles of books. I remember buying canvases and paint, putting on Susanne Vega, Dead Can Dance and Happy Rhodes and painting late into the night. I remember being broke, really broke. Living on cheetos and coffee broke. I think of all the times I walked to the convenience store near by to get Little Debbie snack cakes, and cheap soda as a treat when we had money. There was the winters, when we would walk to the zoo and pay $1 to walk around because it was so cold. The time that my car got buried in the snow because they didn’t plow our side streets. We lived on rice and ramen, and lots of tea.

We wrote, painted, made paper mache sculptures, celebrated the solstices and lived. We lived hard, we struggled to live hard, but that made it even sweeter.

Well, not quite, but close enough.

I found some tapes from various rehearsals in 1991, including songwriting and pre-production for an album that got two-thirds recorded and then failed to happen.

It was weird hearing us back then, both talking and playing, cos we were all very different people than we are now. I hardly recognised myself, even. Happily, we seemed to be much better players than I remembered.

It kind of struck me hard when I heard him talking and playing cos we'd met and become friends at school in 1982. But now here's this guy who's been dead since 1994, pounding the drums like a heavy Ginger Baker or a sober John Bonham or a Neil Peart who'd somehow learned restraint. And, even though these tapes are all kinds of crappy and old and printed through, suddenly he's alive again. For a few minutes at a time, anyway.

It figuratively stopped me cold in my tracks and made me wonder what he'd be doing today if cancer hadn't stolen the rest of his life.

Don't throw out those recorded snippets of friends and loved ones, save them. Our memories slowly (if we’re fortunate) fade with time.

And sometimes, without warning, that slow fade turns into a sudden blackout.