The Memory Box

The things an old song can unlock

I know memory is not some kind of DOC or JPEG or MP4 file stored in the brain, complete and coherent and ready to be “read” whenever needed. I know that much. I know memory is more about electricity and neural pathways and synapses. But none of that explains (to me) how I woke up this morning with a very particular song in my head—a song I hadn’t heard or thought about in 40 years. How does that happen?

It wasn’t a pop song or an old standard that stays alive in the environment and refreshes itself in one’s memory by hearing snatches of it here and there. It was a song I wrote for a play back in college. I can promise you that no one has sung the song in all the years since we staged the play. I’m quite sure no one has even thought about it, including me.

Was I dreaming about that play? I don’t know. I woke up with the song in my head but no clear reason for it. I brushed my teeth and got into the shower, and the song was there—fully there in my mind, every verse, every line, as through it had been weeks, not decades.

How do electrical pulses and myelin sheaths and synapses explain a thing like that? I’m sure some people understand it, but I’m not one of them.

Nor do I understand how something like a remembered song can open the door to so many more memories, as though they’re all simply waiting in some physical form, freshly cleaned and ironed and waiting to be picked up—which, I know, they are not.

But that is exactly what happened.

I remembered humming that tune to myself in Oxford, England, during a study abroad program after my freshman year of college. I remembered walking along the Thames every night after dinner, thinking my lonely thoughts and humming my lonely tune—and then, over time, adding words to it as the idea for a play started taking shape.

I didn’t think of myself as a playwright back then, but I had worked with people in my college sketch comedy group during my freshman year to take some ridiculous joke-lyrics that my high school friends and I had penned and turn them into something like a musical. It had been a lot of fun to do, and it was something no one else on campus was doing at the time, and when it was all over and we were taking down the set, people turned to me and asked me, “what’s next?” as though I had a grand plan in my head, which I absolutely did not.

But now, walking along the Thames by myself, I started thinking about what we could do next, if people really wanted to do something next. And the ideas combined with my feelings of homesickness and loneliness to create a sad, simple love song that I hummed and then sang to myself on my evening walks, pretending that the song was just about a character in a play and not about me.

I didn’t keep to myself or hide from people during that summer program. I did have friends. I went out and did things. But I do remember having that lonely-in-a-crowd feeling that I’ve had so many times in my life, and I remember doing the “Irish goodbye” on occasion, though I didn’t know the term for it back then. There were just times when making up worlds in my head was more comfortable and comforting than dealing with the world around me. Then and now.

I’m not a carpenter or a crafter or a mechanic, but in my own way I’ve been a maker of things—a moundbuilder like my most ancient ancestors—and, often, I’ve been the leader of teams that make things together. I’ve been at my happiest when I’ve been able to create something new—a play, a novel, a curriculum program, an education product.

Does it bother me that the things I’ve put my hand to are of no use to anyone anymore—the plays no one produces, the novels no one reads, the lesson plans discarded when a new superintendent comes to town, the programs shelved in search of something newer and shinier?

Yes, it bothers me sometimes. I feel like the wind sweeps sand over my footprints as soon as I can make them—that when I pause to look back, there is nothing behind me to see. Which ought to be reason enough not to look back.

But, you know…I didn’t ask to remember that dumb song from 40 years ago. My brain had other ideas, though, and here I am, looking back.

And here I am, still—that lonely-in-a-crowd boy who walks along the river and wonders, “what’s next?”

Older boy, different river, same question.

Happy new year.