The Bag I Carried Back
I was ten, walking home from school,
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The Bag I Carried Back
They were about ten years old. On the walk home from school they found a black plastic bag, and the bag was moving. There were kittens inside it, several of them, alive. Somebody had left them there, so they picked the bag up and ran the rest of the way home, sure they could fix it.
Their parents did not want a cat. They did not want any pet at all. The child said nobody had to keep the kittens, that the family only had to help them find someone who would. Nobody answered.
So the bag went back down the street and was set down where it had been found. What stays with them is that they were not crying at the time. They remember being a little disappointed, and nothing more.
Years later they wrote it out in I left a bag of abandoned kittens behind when I was 10, and it still haunts me. They have three cats now. They still wonder what became of those kittens, and they still cannot work out why the grown-ups in that story did not try harder.
"The Bag I Carried Back" is the ballad that came out of it. Piano and voice hold the first verse on their own. Strings and light percussion arrive with the first chorus and step back again; the second pre-chorus is nearly empty, the bridge is bare, and the last chorus opens wide before the piano is left by itself.
The song turns on the sentence the child tried and nobody answered:
You didn't have to keep them, you just had to help them.
Play it on a walk home, or on an evening when a memory you thought you had filed away turns out to still be in your hands. It is for anyone who did something at ten and has been quietly explaining it to themselves ever since.
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