trapped in time
in the late 80s i had a bass student named josie. she was 15 then, i think. maybe 16. we had fun in lessons — got along great personally — but she wasn’t too serious about playing bass, and was using the lessons to kill time or something. like i did with a few students here and there (the best and the worst), i suggested she stop, because i didn’t feel right taking her parents’ money when she wasn’t playing much except during the lessons.
still i would see her nearly every week for a while. she’d drop by to hang out with her friend who took lessons at the store. 
have a vague recollection that they both visited my recording studio once together and hung out, maybe while recording a local band josie loved. however it happened, she was a pretty good casual friend under the circumstances, and i don’t think she ever much begrudged me telling her to stop taking lessons. her parents were cool too.
i’m thinking about her right now because i was going through some old box of doodads or whatever and found a bookmark she’d bought for me. said on the back,
To Charley,
with love
Josie
kinda like this:
this was a sweet kid, typical teenage angst and frustration, but josie was also more open and bitter about things — probably why we got along pretty well. i liked that she didn’t have a big insulating safety layer of BS surrounding her. she was passionate about Jane’s Addiction, which led me to not hating them so much, then in the mid 90s taping one of their SNL appearances, and earlier this year transferring it to YouTube, where thousands of people enjoyed watching it until, despite the intentional absence of any giveaway tags on the vid, NBC got wind and had it removed. those thousands watched it, favorited it, and argued about it because of her minor influence on my life almost 20 years ago.
shortly after giving me that bookmark, josie died in a car crash. just gone. somebody told me about it, and in 15 seconds josie had stopped aging. i wanted to call her parents, but what do you say? i didn’t know them that well. i didn’t even know their daughter that well. it was just that josie seemed like such a great fit at the music store, giving people crap, laughing… showing a greater passion for listening to music than most people did playing it. i know that’s not highly unusual with teenagers, especially some girls, but it never gets tiring to see.
does it make sense that when i think of josie she’s stuck back there in 1989? why can i not make her older, give her boyfriends, then a husband and kids? concerts. though i rarely think of her, i’ve retained this guilt about a responsibility to keep her existing somehow, like i never… well how do you say goodbye to someone nobody knows is leaving?
then i’d think about her parents, and there’s another burden, as though i owe them something. some communicated participation in their grief. i don’t know. the bookmark that i can’t discard, so every few years i look at it and remember josie, angry about all that work she put in — learning about life, adjusting to things that bothered her, worrying about what to do after high school. “cow pie high”, i think is what she called her school, since it was a tech deal where some of the students learned to farm.
and though i can instantly place myself back in that practice room, laughing and jiving, seeing and hearing, i can’t remember her last name. that passionate girl with the funny dad and friendly mom.