“It’s too late, she’s gone.”  

I watch an old clip on YouTube. Clapton without Duane on the Johnny Cash Show, country-blues riff on Brownie the legendary Stratocaster that sold for half a million dollars decades ago.

“It’s too late, she’s gone.”  

I watch Bobby Whitlock on furious background vocals and piano. I watch killer Jim Gordon on drums. Carl Radle on bass, probably on smack as well — and Clapton on Brownie and blues and Patti Boyd and yes, heroin.  Thinking of Johnny Cash offscreen in a ruffled shirt.  

“It’s too late, she’s gone.”

I’m digging the song, if not the era. Nostalgia is lost on me. I like living in the moment and half or more of the people I have known are dead and don’t live in that moment or any moment now.

Classic rockers are good, are bad.  It takes all kinds to make a moment. This is a moment I am making by myself in the living room before dawn — Jim Gordon is dead, Carl Radle is dead, Johnny Cash too. We do still have Whitlock. I try to pretend we don’t have Clapton.

My guitar hand is gone but my nostalgia for it needs to be kept at bay.

Sunrise coming, this hemisphere’s feeling so cold, feels like the world closing in.  

Tell me it’s not too late.