  The laundry is going, spinning. My daughter, 19, just came in, sweaty from the longish bike ride home. "Not as flat as Brooklyn is it? " (referring to her address 9 months out of 12. ) Just last week we were riding ancient raleighs over the Manhattan Bridge into Chinatown.
Now, we're washing mountains of laundry listening to my old Specials records (! ) on her newly acquired yard-sale find: The Fisher Futura Stereo. Middle brother yells to lower the volume. Littlest brother seems unfazed. She thinks my writing this blob-thing or blog or whatever, is indicative of my having too much time, of being a "nerd loser" but my motives come from a much darker place - the realization that my time is running out.
It started a few weeks ago when I was talking to my daughter, then in NYC, who had just watched the movie 24 hour party people , which I have not seen. Since I had been a fan of several bands featured, namely Howard Devoto and Joy Division, I was explaining to her the different interrelated band members that worked with Devoto in The Buzzcocks, Magazine, etc.
I went on-line to a Magazine site, out of curiosity, saying to my daughter, "let's see what has Howard Devoto been doing all these years? " Once I had met him at a dinner party at the house of another ex-pat, and he was a guest and quite warm, he had an American girlfriend and was quite fond of her parents ranch or farm, I can't remember which. He was a small man who enjoyed American Western life, maybe it was Minnesota so that's not Western, let's just say ranch/country life.
It all makes sense if you've ever been to a northern England town, the grayness can be intolerable. Life can be distilled to football and the pub. I found the official website and was reading it to her when I clicked on John McGeoch. I started to read and saw the word dead. I couldn't believe it, he was dead , died in his sleep. He had become a nurse. The whole story didn't resonate. How could he be dead? In my mind he was young, with a floppy curly mass of red hair, a little odd looking, but a great guitarist, everyone knew that.
There were funny old stories I had heard. My old boyfriend with whom I resided had been in a band and he told of the time that the guitarist for Siousxie and the Banshees had had enough, and so left in the middle of the night leaving Robert Smith of the Cure (who was opening for them) to fill-in. Then they got McGeoch. They may have been saved by him. That was great luck. I continued to read from the official website.
He had formed a short-lived band with Richard Jobson of the Skids, but after that never really found a band to call home, the whole story was too sad. Joe Strummer was gone, and now so was John McGeoch. All of this means that age has caught up, it's nothing new, exactly what generations before realized when their notable members started to die.
Certainly they too felt a sense of urgency, because it didn't seem possible that Joe Strummer or John McGeoch, who were permanently suspended in my past, could never be part of the future. 
