[G] Up past the dump road, [C] left at the [G] birch,
Where the [Em] blacktop quits and the [C] gravel [D] starts,
There's a [G] pond the ice left [C] ten thousand [G] years ago,
[Em] Round as a [C] promise and [D] twice as [G] cold.

Chorus:
[C] Kettle Pond, [G] Kettle Pond,
[Em] Hold the sky the way you [D] always have.
[C] I've been gone, I've [G] been gone,
[Em] But you know me [D] when I come [G] back.

[G] My father swam it [C] every June at [G] dawn,
Out [Em] to the big rock and [C] back a-[D]gain,
And I'd [G] stand on the dock with my [C] towel [G] on,
[Em] Counting his [C] strokes up [D] to [G] ten.

(Chorus)

[G] Now there's a sign at the [C] turn that says [G] Private Road,
And a [Em] man from away built a [C] house on the [D] point,
But the [G] loons don't read and the [C] water don't [G] know,
And it [Em] lets me [C] in when I [D] go [G] in.

[G] I drove up a-[C]lone in Sep-[G]tember last year,
Laid my [Em] guitar in the [C] grass by the [D] shore,
And the [G] water was black, and the [C] water was [G] clear,
And [Em] just as [C] cold as be-[D]fore. [G]

(Chorus, twice)

Where it came from: My family had a camp in New Hampshire when I was a kid, four rooms and an outhouse, on a pond about the size of a big parking lot. A kettle pond is what you get when the glaciers left a chunk of ice buried in the ground and it melted and left a hole, so it's deep and round and cold even in August. My dad swam it every morning. We sold the camp when I was nineteen. I drove up last fall just to look, and nobody stopped me, and I wrote this in the car on the way home on the back of a gas receipt.

There's a bell above the door, it rings when you come in,
And the floorboards give a little where the boots have worn them thin,
And it smells like oil and birdseed and a cellar after rain,
And my grandfather's behind the counter, and he knows you by your name.

Nails by the pound from a wall of little drawers,
Keys cut while you wait, and a cat asleep across the floor,
And if you didn't need the fancy one, he'd tell you to your face,
And sell you the cheap one, and show you how it goes in place.

Chorus:
Oh, it's all hardware,
Hinges and screws and a folding chair,
Things that hold and things that turn,
And things it took a life to learn.

They built the big store out by the highway in '91,
With a lot like a frozen lake and a sign like the rising sun,
And the bell above his door got quiet one day at a time,
Till he locked it on a Saturday and hung a hand-lettered sign.

(Chorus)

He's eighty-one, he lives now in a place with a nurse,
He fixes everybody's lamps and says the coffee could be worse,
And when I come to visit, he asks what's broke at my place,
And I always bring him something, just to see his face.

(Chorus)

Where it came from: My grandfather Clyde ran a hardware store in the town where I grew up for forty years, from 1951 until 1991. I spent every Saturday of my childhood there, sorting washers. He's the one who traded the lawn mower for my first guitar. He is eighty-one and he has heard this song, and his only note was that the store never sold folding chairs. I told him it rhymed. He said, "Well, then."

Every other Tuesday, at a quarter after nine,
An old man brings his old dog in,
Seventy-eight and fourteen, walking in a line,
Both of them slower than they've been.
He lifts him to the table like a basket full of eggs,
Says, "Easy, Duke," the way you'd say a prayer,
And the old dog thumps his tail against the steel
Because he knows that I'll be there.

Chorus:
So take your time in Room Three,
There's nobody waiting on me.
Let the clock on the wall do what clocks do;
I'll hold him steady for you.

The doctor listens to that tired old heart
And says, "He's doing fine, for what he is,"
And the old man laughs and says, "Well, that makes two,"
And scratches the white along his chin.
He tells me about the summer Duke swam out
After a duck halfway across the lake,
And I've heard it maybe twenty times by now,
And I'd hear it twenty more for his sake.

(Chorus)

Someday it'll be a Tuesday
When the old man comes in on his own,
Or the dog comes in with somebody's daughter,
And I'll know without being told.
But today they're both still walking,
And today the sun came through,
So I slipped Duke an extra biscuit,
And I slipped the old man one too.

(Chorus)

Where it came from: Every vet tech has a Duke. Mine is a golden retriever who has gone completely white in the face, and his dad is a retired mailman who still calls me "young lady." I asked them both before I sang this in public. Duke wagged. His dad said, "Make me taller." (Yes, I really do give him a biscuit. He prefers the liver ones. Duke, I mean.) That's our furnace you can hear on the tape in the second verse.

The radiator clanks all night like a man with a grudge,
The landlord says he's coming Tuesday, but the landlord doesn't budge,
The trolley shakes the windows every time it rumbles through,
And the mice have got a key now, and they're paying rent too.

There's a hole in the back porch big enough to lose a cat,
And we did lose one, for a week, and I don't want to talk about that,
And the shower's got two settings, which are Arctic and Hell,
And the kitchen smells like somebody else's dinner, and it always will.

Chorus:
Third floor, Allston,
Forty-four stairs and a door that sticks,
Four hundred dollars and the heat thrown in
(The heat was a rumor, the heat was a myth),
But I was twenty-two, and the key was mine,
And the world was out there, and so was I,
Third floor, Allston, and I'd climb those stairs again.

My roommate played the bass at two a.m. for free,
The other one ate my peanut butter and then blamed it on me,
And we sat out on the fire escape on the first warm night in May
With three mismatched glasses and nothing much to say.

(Chorus)

Where it came from: I lived on a side street off Commonwealth Avenue from 1991 to 1994 with two roommates, one of whom now has a real job in Chicago and one of whom still owes me for a jar of peanut butter. The trolley really did shake the windows. The cat did come home. The landlord did not come Tuesday. This one gets the biggest laugh at the Bent Spoon, mostly from people under twenty-five who live there now.

Park Street at a quarter to one,
Guitar case, and the set is done,
Eleven dollars in the jar and a cup of tea for free,
And the last train out is waiting there for me.

There's a nurse in her blue scrubs fast asleep,
A boy with a cello he can hardly keep
From tipping over every time we take a curve,
And a man with a paper reading every single word.

Chorus:
Red Line, midnight,
Carry us home,
Over the river and under the town,
Nobody talking, but nobody alone.
Red Line, midnight,
Carry us home.

Then we come up out of the dark
Onto the bridge like a lit-up ark,
And the whole city's sitting on the water like a cake,
And for half a minute everybody's wide awake.

(Chorus)

Kendall, Central, Harvard Square,
Somebody's always getting off somewhere,
And I'll get off at Davis when we're nearly at the end,
And I'll walk home humming, and I'll do it all again.

(Chorus)

Where it came from: Every Boston musician has a Red Line song, I think. This is mine. When you come from Park Street going outbound, the train comes up out of the tunnel at Charles and goes across the bridge over the river, and at night with the lights on the water it's the prettiest minute in the whole city, and nobody ever looks up from their book. I always look up. Stan sings the harmony on the tape.

I brought my car in, in April, making a sound like a can of nails,
You lay down underneath it, and you listened, and you smiled,
You said, "She isn't dying, she's just lonesome, that's all,"
And you fixed it for nothing, and the next night you called.

Chorus:
Grease and all, grease and all,
I'll take your hand, grease and all.
There's no soap in the world that'll get it all out,
And I would never ask you to.

You can tell what's wrong with an engine by the way it says hello,
You can back a trailer down a hill in a foot of snow,
But you can't dance a lick and you can't carry a tune,
And you sit in the back of every show I do.

(Chorus)

Some girls want a fella in a jacket and a tie,
With his fingernails all shiny and his collar starched and dry,
But I'll take a man who knows how things are put together,
And how they come apart, and how you fix them, for whatever.

(Chorus, twice, slower the second time)

Where it came from: This is for Darren, who really did fix my car for nothing, and who really did call the next night, and who really does sit in the back of every show with his arms folded, like a bouncer, and claps louder than anybody. He says this song is "fine." Then he asks me to play it again.