silhouette turning points

	On & off through the mid-nineties, I toured with just one acoustic guitar & a cream train case that held the usual: strings, cables, a tuner & other performance helpers. 

It still has two names & numbers from that time, sharpied on the inside of the lid — business contacts I don’t remember ever contacting.

The Silhouette joined other rehabbed thrift store luggage & a few actual road cases when I began traveling with more instruments: acoustic & electric guitars & a growing collection of pedals, as well as keyboards like small Casios & a revolving lineup of air chord organs. 

My longest-running bandmate, Silhouette, pictured here with my Lady Baltimore.

Eventually, the Silhouette was relegated to an easy semi-retirement by taking on the non-musical role of touring odd-&-ends — like the everything drawer in your house, usually in the kitchen. In this case, it rode in the passenger seat stocked with surplus condiment packs, sporks & plastic motel bathroom cups absconded long the way. 

It was also prepared for any degree of desperation with various bandage sizes, a wine opener & a lighter. Sometimes a small notebook would surface with barely legible scrawls that seemed to mean something at the time — notes made while driving & thinking too much or forgotten rants recorded in a pre-dawn two-star insomnia. 

The serrated knife was included in a killer Wisconsin food basket I was gifted by one of my first living room show hosts years ago. I still travel with it. 

The SPAM ice scraper was purchased about twenty-five years ago from The SPAM Museum, where that day, I purchased all of my loved ones’ holiday presents at once. It saved me during a New England blizzard years later.

The pocket knife has a story without an origin:

	It was 1996. I’d just leased my Toyota Tacoma pickup. I had a black fiberglass tonneau cover installed on the bed. 

I was driving around Los Angeles with afternoon free time, just meandering through neighborhoods. I parked for some reason — probably a guitar store. When I got out, I noticed something on the bed cover — in the middle — a pocketknife. 

It wasn’t mine. I hadn’t had one since I was a kid. This was my first stop after hours of driving.

I thought about all the on-&-off ramps I’d taken, the corners & sudden traffic-veering — somehow the knife had ridden it all out. 

I put it in the Silhouette. It lives there now as just another mystery in our overall chronicle, still ongoing & always, again, coming soon.