One has been getting a New York state driver’s license. The whole time overseas, I never felt the need to replace my Ohio license. Apparently there are a few states that have worked things out with the French government to make their licenses easily transferable to a French one: Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia (I think France just took a poll of the people least likely to come to France and made those the allowable ones), so I could have dumped Ohio for a more continental-sounding permis de conduire but that wouldn’t have been so handy for evading speeding fines. The fines are more and more frequent due to the number of discreet speed cameras they’ve been installing.

No, I stayed Ohio-proud as a cost-cutting measure in Europe, but back here in the US, I was eager to trade Ohio for New York. I wanted to turn model citizen and be who I say I am, as well as not have to withstand the looks of pity or hear tales of woe about the time someone had to live in Toledo for three years. And I worried about things like the NY state trooper who pulled us over on the highway for the van being “too loud” (the problem has since been fixed, honest Officer!) and how he could have cited me for the out of state license when I told him we’d been living in New York for two months.

Anyone who’s lived in New York City has likely been scarred and traumatized by a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles, where the line of applicants stretches around the block, and the sadism of the clerks is legendary.

But mostly I was worried about the eye test. Maybe it’s the stress but my eyesight has gotten worse lately. I kept thinking I’d better get a new eyeglass prescription before I went in to exchange licenses. What if they decided I’m too vision-impaired to drive, even with glasses, and said “we’ll hold on to this” with my current license? I remembered the rigorous eye test at the Ohio Dept. of Motor Vehicles, where you look in this dark box and lights flash left and right…if the girl at the counter hadn’t prompted me a little bit, I honestly don’t know if I’d have passed – and that was a while back.

But to get some new glasses I’ve got make some money and I’ve got to drive to make some money so…

I got some sleep and cleaned my glasses and went first thing last Monday. The main street of our town is charming and old-fashioned, with an old movie theatre marquee and cute shop fronts. That particular morning, I saw a policeman leading a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit and leg irons from the jail down to the courthouse which was a little jarring, but I guess it kept things from looking too quaint.

There was a total of one person in front of me in the DMV. He was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and telling the clerk how he wished he had his birth certificate but it was with his ex-wife and she didn’t allow him in the house anymore.

While I was filling out my form another guy came in, somewhere in his seventies, with a lumberjack shirt and boots, very thick glasses. They call everyone by their first names in this DMV, which is kind of sweet: “Now, Richard – it says here you have a hearing aid?”

“What’s that?” Richard the old lumberjack said. The clerk showed him where he’d ticked the box on the form. “Oh, no, guess I got that wrong,” he said, squinting. “My hearing’s fine!” he shouted. “It’s my eyesight that’s not so good.”

“But what’s that in your ear?” the clerk asked, pleasantly.

“Oh, that’s just some cotton I keep in there,” Richard said.

“Okay, well, let’s get you in front of the eye chart here,” said the clerk. They pivoted Richard around and he recited the letters, left to right. I was sitting a good six feet behind him and I could read them too, so I knew I was going to be alright.

Sitting in the audience watching the Chandler Travis Three-O, I got very choked up. They’d left the stage and were playing and singing while moving around the audience. It’s the kind of thing that can seem forced, but it felt so intimate and wacky at the same time. When they played Things To You, that sweet NRBQ song, it almost did me in. It was a mixture of sad and happy, just like the song. Sad about Tom Ardolino, the NRBQ drummer who’d passed away the week before. Happy to be “home”, and simultaneously audience and participant.

They played a Travis/Greenberger composition next, called “This Is Home” – you know that feeling you can get when it seems like a band is telepathically channeling your life into song? He got to a line about “I’ve got boxes of stuff somewhere else” – and then I remembered: Cleveland.

Cleveland. The reason I put “home” in quote marks. Because if I’m honest, part of me still lives there.

“That’s How I Got To Cleveland” is the potential title for a country song parody, or memoir-turned-work of fiction. No matter how it happened, six or seven years later I still have an Ohio driver’s license. A nice guy named Bill still gets the occasional piece of mail for me at the UPS store on Euclid. My cellphone still mystifies people when it comes up in Caller ID – “who the hell’s calling from Ohio?” And there still sits in a storage place in Cleveland Heights a 5 X 8 space with my stuff in it.

Every time I go to make a piece of toast, I remember I’ve got a toaster. Bending down to take a charred piece of bread out of the broiler – “in Cleveland”, I sigh.

“That shirt’s looking a little wrinkled,” I say to Eric. “Let me get the iron-”

“Can’t – it’s in Cleveland,” we say in unison. A certain book, or something from the archives, that space heater or bit of Fiestaware – all in Cleveland.

In France, it was too far away to deal with. There was something comforting about having my little stake back in the states. And there were other toasters and irons. But those things don’t work here in the US. And there’s all that useful stuff sitting only a day’s drive away.

So I figured Rochester was even closer – four hours? I’d booked a ticket on Greyhound, reserved a small truck, had even arranged for a moving guy to help me empty the space and be done with it. But it snowed, and I was running low on money. And I didn’t want to be unloading a truck on my birthday.

In the time I was away, things changed. I catch up at the gym, watching TV on the treadmill. Hoarders shows, and Hot In Cleveland – aging gals who used to be somebody, adjusting their location/expectations to make the most of where they’re at in life. Geography – if you don’t like where you’re at, just change it. Is there a part of me that can’t say goodbye?

I was truly miserable when I lived there – I think I went there to be miserable. But it was the last place my daughter and I lived together. It was where I was living when Eric and I got together. It was cold, lonely, snowy – except when it was disgustingly hot and humid.

But there was a beauty to it, a purity and lack of pretension. Like Pittsburgh, where I grew up, but without the charm.

Storage places bank on this kind of inertia.

My friend Norma  was visiting this past weekend – she said there’s a Women In Rock show going til the end of the month at the Rock Hall of Fame in Cleveland. We’ve made a tentative plan to meet up there. Maybe I just need to trick myself into thinking I’m not moving again. Just stopping by to pay my respects to a small but important part of my life.

And leave with a truck full of stuff.

Then Wikipedia stopped working.

“Oh my God, what have I done wrong?” I wondered. “I’ve broken the Internet.”

But today everything was pretty much back to normal.

The satellite photo is dated December 2010. A year later, we’re living on another continent. Maybe that explains why I feel tired and disoriented a lot of the time. When I’m not ecstatic.

Had some of my family here for Christmas. Managed to cook dinner for everyone even though we ran out of propane in the middle of the preparations, and Eric and my brother Riley had to drive all over Greene County trying to refill the tank (the 24-hour Home Depot kiosk chose Christmas Eve to break down). Riley’s girlfriend Natalie used her iphone to locate a propane dealer, Nick’s Gas.

“Nick, do you have gas?”
“Excuse me, what do you want?”
“We need gas Nick, we need gas! To cook with, for our Christmas dinner!”
“I am closing in three minutes. Also, I am not Nick.”
“Please, uh – sir. They are coming now! Please stay open, please stay open.”

How many times did we run out of cooking gas in the French countryside just as the juices started to flow from a high-priced chicken? Maybe the problem wasn’t France after all.

But the festivities were festive and everybody loved the new house. Then we made it to the city and figured out how to make money down there: if you avoid getting a parking ticket, look at that $75 you don’t end up owing as income! Better yet, go to Hoboken for the last Yo La Tengo Hanukkah show, don’t get booted by the Hoboken parking police, and bam – that $150 we didn’t end up having to pay (as some of the audience members and even one of the performers did) is now surplus lining our pockets.

That way of thinking made me feel good for a day or two, now it’s back to reality and lining up/looking for work.

And trying to update my website/blog etc. I’ve started to find the white type on black harder and harder to read. Anyone else? I wish I could integrate my music site with the blog – it’s all looking a bit disjointed to me.Out of date. But just like everything else after a major relocation, it seems like you can’t do one thing without first doing three other things. Aesthetics, technology, culture…yes it’s all accessible from everywhere but I feel a little left behind. So I just have to watch every episode of Breaking Bad – then I’ll know what to do, right?

In the meanwhile, these ornaments have to go back in the box and the tree has to go…where? Do they pick it up here? Or can I take it to the dump. At least I know where that is – just out past Nick’s Gas…

Along with that deep exhaustion that comes from being in constant motion. Is it worse than the deep exhaustion that comes from doing the same thing every day? Probably not – just different. I read an interview with Todd Rundgren where he says that at 63 he may not be up for the rigors of touring much longer and I’d been thinking maybe if we bumped into him in a motorway Costa Coffee or Days Inn we could talk about it, because sometimes I feel the same way.

I lugged my suitcase, messenger bag and acoustic guitar in a soft case on my back onto a NJ Transit train at Newark Airport. The suitcase was over the 50 lb limit so I’d distributed the extra weight – cables, microphones, clothes and my ancient laptop, more Rosetta Stone than laptop, so big and bulky that a septuagenarian at airport security had pointed out “you know, they make those a lot smaller these days, they call them ‘netbooks’” – into the guitar case and handbag so I was an efficient pack mule. Eric had stayed behind in England to visit with his daughter and granddaughter for a few extra days. It was my first time coming home to the US from a tour in years, and I marveled at how things seemed to work so much better than they used to, from the shuttle trains clearly marked and red-jacketed polite young men guiding and assisting passengers. I slung my guitar onto the overhead shelf of the train bound for Manhattan and sat studying the couple across from me – in their sixties, he in black beret and overcoat; she with short-cropped henna’ed hair and little round black framed glasses, also dressed entirely in black except for multicolored striped socks. I strained to hear what language they were speaking: Russian? German?

French. They were speaking French. I felt disoriented, trying to remember where I was going. Where do I live?

When the train reached Penn Station, I hustled to catch the 7:15 PM Amtrak train for Hudson, flowing through and against the tide of humanity who seemed to be headed in every possible direction with absolute confidence and certainty. I remembered this feeling, deep in my soul if not in my head and joined in, reading signs and following arrows as if by osmosis.

“Can I buy a ticket on the train?” I asked the dapper Amtrak agent at the track entrance.

“Use the machine right there,” he pointed. The clock said 7:13. I bought the ticket and ran back to him. His face was stony. “The doors are closed – you’ll have to get the next train. Change your ticket over there.” He pointed to a long customer service line.

I wheeled the suitcase around and got in line, cursing and sweating. Reaching behind to pull my hair up off my neck, I felt an unusual draft back there where my guitar case usuall- SHHIIIIIITTTT!!!

Running back through the throngs to NJ Transit, I was already simultaneously a) filing a false insurance claim for a stolen guitar; b) getting the old Guild out of mothballs; or c) (maybe it’s for the best?) retiring.

By the time I found the Customer Service office, I was silently thanking the stern Amtrak official who’d closed the gate and kept me from boarding the train. Otherwise wouldn’t I be realizing, just as the train reached somewhere near Yonkers, that I had to turn around and go back to find my guitar? At least I was still sort of on site, able to speak to someone in person, or fill out a form or…or. Please – I don’t want it to end this way. A young woman in front of me in the Transit office line, hearing the sounds of anguished hyperventilating behind her, stepped aside. “You go first,” she said.

The official looked like Kenny G.

“Did anyone…” I gasped, “find a guitar on the Newark Airport train?”

He smiled. “Does it look like this?” There it was. My Gibson. “It was just brought in. You can have it, but only if you play ‘Stairway To Heaven’ first.”

Back in a terminal bar called “Kabooze”, I shared a table with the guitar and drank the best beer I ever tasted in my life. When “Brown Sugar” came on the bar stereo, a weird speaker arrangement had Keith’s guitar just above my head. Mick, the band, all the other stuff, was a barroom away. But Keith played, almost like he was playing just for me. I sipped my beer and listened to every lick. “This ain’t over yet, baby,” it seemed like he was saying.

“You have reached your destination” said Tim, our GPS man with the crisp Continental diction. I’d forgotten tucking Tim into my bag for guidance as I’d set off on foot to find a music store.

Eric is convinced Tim’s a camp out of work thespian picking up pocket money on the side. Not totally British, his accent hints at all sorts of seedy possibilities. We have such a close relationship with him, I felt a sense of shame exposing him in public like that. I almost blushed remembering how just that afternoon we’d fallen about the van laughing as Eric and Tim did one of their familiar routines:

Tim: Exit ahead. Then take the motorway.
Eric (hurriedly): Tim, how can we make the chateau less damp?
Tim: Take the exit.
Eric: (insistently) But the chateau, Tim, the castle! How can we make it less damp?
Tim: Take the motorway.

I had been rushing to buy extra strings for a big show at Union Chapel in London. It’s one of those places you notice people playing at and think “now that’s a gig.” And here we were about two hours away from playing to a sellout crowd.

Two nights before we’d been at the New Orleans Jazz Club in Louth, playing under a flourescent strip light with a picture of the queen and a Confederate flag behind us. From the ridiculous to the sublime with a live session on the Mark Riley radio show, in the gleaming new spaceship headquarters of the BBC Manchester, in between as launching ramp in our rise to stardom.

Not our stardom, really. Eric and I were special guests of Adrian Edmondson and the Bad Shepherds, who we’d loved at the Rhythm Festival 2 years ago and who cover Whole Wide World along with a well-chosen selection of other punk era songs, played in a spirited folk style. That doesn’t do the experience justice, and please forgive the use of the word “spirited” – I’m no music critic.

But there’s always that feeling of possibility with a big show like this, born from watching too many movies, that you’ll walk out on the altar a mere artist and working musician and go back into the vestry a star. “Chapel” had me imagining a humble, chaste and dignified rectangle but Union Chapel is a soaring octagonal domed space. It lends an air of gravity and importance to whatever happens there, I guess, but trying to do our set was a challenge because of sound restrictions decreed by the local council. “Let the room do the work” the soundman said, as if through divine intervention our musical intent would flow out if we just stood on the stage, limp chalices to be emptied of our offerings through supplication.

I remembered why I stopped going to church years ago.

Ade and his band were really sweet backstage in the communal “meeting room” but it was a bit like arriving at a party when people are finishing the last bottles of beer and starting to eye half-drunk ones, cause this was the last show of a long tour for them. That weary, punchy, near-hysteria had set in so the only place to find a moment’s peace was in the non-locking toilets, where at least four different touring party members burst in to find me and Eric in varying stages of undress. Not playful conjugal rights in the toilet-type action but two shabby showfolk stuffing themselves into hastily mended and ironed stage clothes and trying to sort out a setlist that wouldn’t trigger the volume meter.

Had tuning troubles to start, and I flubbed the end of a song. We played okay and got a few laughs and warm applause from an audience stiffly sitting on pews in their coats. Then there was that awkward time afterwards at the merch table, with people coming up asking for Bad Shepherds t-shirts, and the occasional happy fan. We snuck out for fish and chips with friends because our rider of hot meal had never materialized and caught some of the show’s finale – again, the acoustics were creating too much “atmosphere” and not enough focused sound but the rhythmic energy of the group came through.

The next night was an old working men’s club in Hebden Bridge, an interestingly artsy town outside Manchester. I felt kind of low after Union Chapel. Just wished it had been – more…what? Special, fun, something. It seemed like it should’ve been, with the massive dome and the big crowd and arches of stone and dramatic lighting. I checked the GPS to see how long the drive would take. Tim did the calculations: London to Hebden Bridge – 63 hours. WHA- oh, right, I still had him set for walking to the guitar shop.

The Trades Club in Hebden Bridge was an unexpectedly great place to play. Maybe because I hadn’t wanted so badly for it to be great. It took three hours to drive there, and no time at all to get somewhere on stage.

I guess I should detail all the places we’ve played so far: Chichester, Bristol, Coventry and Hull. The shows have gone well with surprisingly good-sized audiences (though Bristol was a little slim…it’s often that way but I still always enjoy playing there and they have some of the best Chinese restaurants in the country). When we collected the guitars from baggage claim, the headstock on the Harmony was broken so I’ve been struggling on a borrowed Gibson while our pal Andy fixes the damage. It’ll hopefully result in just a characterful scar – I miss that guitar. I just don’t click with the Gibson electric like I do with the Harmony. Come back old friend, please, in time for the London show on Saturday!

Sometimes it feels like I’ve written about every kind of gig and venue and there’s nothing more to say without repeating myself or boring myself and anyone bothering to read things here. There – that’s a shocking thing I realize from being out on tour: people actually read things I write on this blog or Twitter or Facebook. I find it amazing that a person in…Chichester would arrive with two Harmony guitars in the back of his car because he read that we were down a guitar. Maybe that’s part of what makes going around and around again not a slog – I might feel tired of filthy stage carpet and nasty dressing room couches I couldn’t imagine sitting on, but I’ll never get tired of knowing something I wrote or sang or said connected with somebody halfway across the world.

And there is always something new to see, a wild frontier to conquer. We drove through Lincolnshire the other day. It was eerie with mist, big flat spaces and the occasional cabbage. My only association with the place is that as a teenager obsessively reading liner notes and band biographical material I learned it was where Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s songwriting partner came from. Now that I’ve seen it, it makes sense that he’d fantasize and write lyrics about America’s Old West – or anywhere that wasn’t Lincolnshire. As much sense as a girl growing up in Pittsburgh would listen to a song called “Grimsby”, completely miss the irony and long to travel and see this wondrous place.

So tonight, it’s Louth. Not quite Grimsby, not yet. But there’s always the next tour.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that needs to be done to this house. It’s easy to forget that it was only a year ago we were here in the northeast US looking around at possible places to move to. We went back to France with a huge list of jobs that needed to be done to sell that house. And a vague idea of something called an “immigrant visa.”

Now we’re completely relocated and feel at home in many ways. Starting to become familiar with the area, meeting more and more neighbors and locals. Even venturing out for a gig over the weekend: “Live Rust” would be an appropriate title for the performance, it was that creaky. The sound didn’t help but the audience were sweet. Stayed way too long after but at least it meant there were fewer drivers on the Long Island Expressway.

The gutters and winterizing feel kind of crucial because we’re leaving for almost a month to play gigs in the UK and what if some harsh weather comes on while we’re away? Apparently, the Previous Owners used to pour their all into Halloween displays worthy of visits from the local TV news crew; the Christmas lights were also industrial-strength – if only the same amount of care and effort had gone into keeping water out of the basement and windows from rotting loose!

But every now and then I notice little items that they left behind and I think those people couldn’t have been all bad.