Usually it's when I listen to music from the 1970's. I was a child then, as I graduated high school in 1981. As a child, I didn't go out of my way to listen to music; I absorbed it by osmosis from the AM station in our car and clutched my little brick AM radio with its mono earplug at night.
I knew all the songs, however. I knew them as narrative to a time of solitude, of lying in my room crying over the bullies at school, of words not being sufficient, of glimmers of light when someone extended a hand. Of scraps of poetry, words written in pencil on lined paper, fading as pencil often did over the years.
I do not remember well. My memory is like a pile of Polaroids, instant photos, jumbled on a table, and I pull a random one out. I remember the snippet of memory in the photo and it evokes emotion. The story that goes with the words starts with "I remember when" but has very few words attached. The few stories I remember don't have video with them, only words.
The right song pulls the most obscure photo from the bottom of the pile, the one that's faded, whose colors have reverted to greyish brown. All of the emotions, however are there, and I find myself weeping at something lost that I can't really see.
Right now I'm listening to a playlist on the stereo, with luscious rich tones that we didn't know in the AM radio era, and I travel in the back of a station wagon in 1974, nine years old, trying to make sense of the world.
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