Maybe it’s the light that’s started the slide carousel of memories clicking off in my brain. The way it just spills right down to the ground with very few skyscrapers to bank off of. I find myself squinting slightly, looking around, and thinking “wait, haven’t I been here before?” And sometimes I actually have been there (or at least in the vicinity). Yesterday, for instance, I went to Long Beach and had a chance to spend the afternoon with my dear friend Mary. We have about four decades of friendship under our belt and as we walked around she reminded me of a place I’d lived near (on?) Ocean Blvd when we were both going to Cal State Long Beach. I remembered the apartment for sure. An expansive one-bedroom with a view across the boulevard of the ocean where I lived for a time with my British boyfriend, Richard. I remembered that the day I’d signed the lease, the owner had looked up and out the window as a jogger collapsed on the long expanse of front lawn. He’d run down to help as a crowd gathered and everyone then realized that the man was not breathing. A blood-clot had passed through his lungs (according to the EMS or maybe that was just the assumption of a bystander). I don’t remember if I was standing next to the owner and hearing the news or if he’d come back up to the apartment and told me. But that event I do remember, yet it’s anyone’s guess where the apartment actually was on this stretch of boulevard.

This memory thing is funny. When I asked Mary, “Hey, do you think it’s weird not to remember large swathes of moments in life?” she answered, “not really” because, and I’m paraphrasing here, life moves along and there are so many things that fill it up that to remember all the many details would make your head explode (that last bit I completely put into my speak). And I do agree, although sometimes I’m still unsettled by the loss or fuzziness of memories in my head. Like there will be an itch in my brain that really a lot of things happened in this place or during this time, but I remember very few of the details. Given my college life was lived in a time before phone cameras (more specifically, before a time when a phone lived anywhere but connected to a wall), not a lot of documentation went on. I’ve got a few snaps that I put stories too, and when I say stories, I’m allowing for the fact that the setting exists but I may be making up the details wholesale.

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So there I was yesterday thinking back while moving forward, which turned out to be incredibly prescient since in the evening I was lucky, so lucky, to be treated to Patti Smith by my great friend and writing partner, Judy, and her husband, Ian. As a way into memories, Patti Smith is for me an amazing road. Not because I remember having seen her so many times (I haven’t) or because she floods me with thoughts of a particular moment in my life (not really), but instead because she’s so generous with her own thoughts around memories, which makes me think and remember my own. The one and only direct Patti Smith moment was about a decade ago in an S Factor studio in LA when I was doing a workshop and trying so hard to find myself, my rhythm, my soul, my footing, and naturally flailing around the room and slamming into the walls. The teacher had me stop, then put on “Dancing Barefoot” and proceeded to let me do what I needed to in order to get still and break down, then get up again (eventually). And it was Patti Smith’s voice and words, plus her urgency, that got me there. But other than that, she has existed for me as someone whose attitude in living I find inspiring. And as she gets older, her singularity becomes more striking to me. Fashion? I see it in her/on her, but it’s so far from product&pretension as to come in the back door and surprise you. Which naturally has caused some designers to fall all over themselves to emulate it. She’s not unaware, I’m sure, of her style as this look book shows, but it’s so part&parcel of her that to me it doesn’t feel calculated. (A friend once mentioned that he’d seen Patti Smith on the boardwalk in Rockaway Beach and wondered who the old homeless man that everyone was talking to was. That’s how she rolls.)

One of my favorite passages in M Train, Patti’s 2015 book, is about a coat: “I had a black coat. A poet gave it to me some years ago on my fifty-seventh birthday. It had been his—an ill-fitting, unlined Commes de Garçons overcoat that I secretly coveted. … Every time I put it on I felt like myself. The moths liked it as well and it was riddled with small holes along the hem, but I didn’t mind. The pockets had unstitched at the seam and I lost everything I absentmindedly slipped into their holy caves.” This strikes me on so many levels: She’s not unaware of the designer. But the brand doesn’t make her care for the coat overmuch (and in fact we learn she loses the coat and is thoroughly gutted by it, saying, “I continue to search everywhere in vain, hoping it will appear like dust motes illuminated by sudden light”). She treats it like an extension of herself, which is the phrase that I’m most struck by: “Every time I put it on I felt like myself.”

I think about what I put on that makes me feel like myself. There was a time I was convinced I’d moved to New York City as much for the electric stimulus of the place as for the fact that I could have an extensive wardrobe of coats. I imagined, depending on the occasion and my mood, sweeping down the streets in leather dusters, Russian overcoats, faux-leopard fluffy things. I had a coat that looked like the brocade upholstery of an old couch that I wore during my music days. Often people would sit on it at a club or parties, that is how much it resembled furniture. I had a bright yellow, mid-thigh-length, felt coat that had a pouch in the back that I was told was for storing bullets and slinging your firearm while hunting. I kid you not, this may be a slightly faulty memory, but that coat had a pocket big enough for those aforementioned things (along with red leather trim) and it was a mythic bit of my wardrobe. Where did that coat go?

Now that I’m back in the land of light-to-no coat weather, that’s fine. I turn to other moments to wear my identity. At thrift stores I’m always magnetized by the white, gauzy, Indian-inspired pullovers like the one pictured below that I wore to the end of days in high school. I know back then I felt my identity in that shirt: a California girl who would rather be on the beach, sitting around a fire pit while someone strums “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar. Today the slightly see-through quality might not put me so much at ease, but the idea of it floating and easy appeals. I might still enjoy the odd fire pit as long as the sand fleas stay away. And the “Stairway to Heaven,” well sure.

Looking at the picture above, I can see the youth. The early settling into an identity (that would continue and does still change quite often). I was a girl who when told at a concert to raise her arms in the air and shout about how the people have the power, would do that without second thought. Last night, when Patti worked the crowd in that direction, I raised one arm halfway while my brain screamed I feel silly and gaah, I am cynical. Although by the end of the show I was out of my seat and dancing in a way that might embarrass anyone in the club. But really, what club am I talking about? Who cares? I could have been channeling Elaine (the link needs clicking to fully understand) and no one would have given two bits. What was happening had more to do with feeling like myself. Getting out of my own way. Not looking in the mirror and judging.

What do you feel like yourself most in?