New Bedford Renascence ... a limited edition CD and book set by Carl Simmons that was the follow-up to his Anthology Folkatone Music ... Daphne had found her copy while drinking a second glass of wine for the evening and looking indifferently for music to listen to ... maybe White Ladder ... maybe some John Hiatt ... anything.

The Renascence release party had been just about a year ago at Here Be Monsters on William Street in New Bedford and Daphne had lost track of Carl and the others since then. That wasn’t so hard to understand. With influences ranging from Aaron Copeland and Woodie Guthrie to the Beach Boys and Charles Ives, Carl was not much like anything you might have expected to hear coming out of New Bedford ... a listen to Introduction To, Waterless Coathanger, Whip-poor-wool Prelude, or New Bedford Rally Round would quickly convince you of that ... he and the others at Unconcious Piano Productions were so not your mother's Tavares. Simon Cowell would not be giving Carl a call any time soon.

Daphne thought someone had told her that Carl had moved out west. Maybe Colorado? Or he was doing something with videos? She was thinking it was very unlikely that Carl had gone to "settle down in Rochester, making a living writing spinner books about surrounding towns". Where the hell was Rochester anyway?

Two hours and three more glasses of wine later, a very loosely focused Daphne was at the New Wave on North Front Street where she and Nabeeh had once seen Carl play. The Wave wasn’t the way she had remembered it at all. No, she wasn’t sorry that Nabeeh wasn’t here with her ... she wanted nothing more to do with him ... but it just wasn't the same. The very fact that she was sitting in a bar after midnight in this neighborhood, alone while surrounded by people 15 years younger than herself, and drinking another beer that she couldn’t taste seemed a sign that maybe she had a problem ... maybe she didn’t know what she wanted. Sometimes she felt she was nothing but a dreamer. Or that this, Nabeeh, the Wave, everything ... was all just a dream.

Maybe it was or wasn't a dream but it very much was a mistake to come here and another even bigger mistake to turn right instead of left when she walked out. Even if Daphne didn’t know what she wanted there were people at the Wave who did, and two of them got up to follow Daphne as she wandered away wondering where she had parked.