Music, memory, and youth

Few things can rouse long dormant memories for me more strongly than music. Five years ago I put on a CD of dance anthems from 1996 and was treated to images as vivid as if I'd opened a photo album. I remembered what I was doing during that time, what I was feeling. I remembered the absolute freedom I felt dancing to Robert Miles' "Children." I remembered people I had kissed and what it had been like to be with them. It had been a year of beginnings and endings, and I had not expected to have those experiences roar onshore so powerfully when I pressed PLAY.

There is one song in particular that evokes a time and a place for me, not so much as a milestone that I've passed once but more like the "12" on a clock... a lap marker for my life.

It was the summer of 1986. I had moved to California the autumn before to begin my sophomore year at Stanford. One of the first people I met--and friends that I made--was Helen, my next door neighbor in my residence hall. That summer Helen was taking classes at Berkeley, while I had stayed on campus to make some money.

Helen had invited me to spend the weekend in Berkeley with her, and after a day of enjoying the street scene, yogurt, and, no doubt, multiple slices of Blondie's pizza, we found ourselves eating dinner at her apartment, sitting on the floor, and listening to Billy Joel's "Piano Man." It feels as if we listened to the song several times over, but that may be a grace note I've added to the memory. Maybe we heard it just once, and it has been my replaying that night over and over in my head which has had the song come to define the experience.

The lyrics and the mood of "Piano Man" captured me that night and have never really let go. In the past few years, I've begun to wonder what it was about a song that speaks so clearly of unrealized dreams that could have had such a profound an impact on a 20 year old man just starting his own adult journey.

TWO THOUSAND AND FIVE marked the 20th anniversary of my move to California, and I flew down from Portland to visit Helen and the few other friends that had turned out to be, as I had predicted, my "Big Chill" friends. We shared a wonderful dinner and conversation, and we all learned something new that night about what we had each been thinking two decades earlier as our friendships were forming.

A week later I received an email from my high school English teacher, a surprising coincidence given that I had shared with Helen and my other friends something that I had learned from Marcia all those years ago. One day in English class, she and I had been discussing writing and memory, and she had shared the idea that we can only remember our past through the prism of our current perspective. And the continuity that this provides gives us a sense of identity, of having a fundamental self that does not change over the years.

It was a notion that stuck with me, something which I simply accepted as truth because it resonated so with how things seemed to me. And in reminding Marcia of that conversation, I connected this wisdom of hers with something that my friend Michael's father had shared with him the year before, not long before he died. Michael and Gale had been talking about life. Like me, Michael was transitioning from his 30s to his 40s, and he had told his father that his life was not at all what he expected it would be like. His father responded that it had never been so for him either, that no milestone yet had ever had the flavor that he'd expected it to have. That no matter how old he was, he always just felt like himself.

Here was some more proof, I thought, of the continuity of our identity and the power of the present, of the right now, to shape our experience. And this took me back to "Piano Man" and again, that question: why did it affect me so that night?

I began to think that we have it all wrong about youth. We live in a youth-oriented, perhaps even obsessed, culture, with so many trying to remain young, to look young, too often without much grace. But the reality of youth matches neither the expectations we have of it or the nostalgia for what it was. In my youth there was so much longing for experiences that hadn't happened yet. There was that feeling of dying for things to happen. At 20 I hadn't come out yet. I'd never been in love. I wanted that, in particular, so incredibly strongly, and it was those unfulfilled romantic dreams which had "Piano Man" figure so powerfully in my consciousness. I was not a middle-aged, broken down, lonely man at a bar. I was instead someone who hadn't even felt the freedom to love yet.

And here I am almost 20 years older than that night when I sat yearning in Berkeley. I have loved. Several times. And I've lost those loves only to gain so many friends. I've finally become comfortable with myself, just as I am and just as I'm not. I've had enough time to fulfill some dreams, and for me, it's the things I've done and the happiness I have with where I am which overshadow the things I haven't done yet. I get that what I thought life was going to be like was made up by a child, namely me. And I understand now that I am free to create the rest of my life on my terms, designed here and now by my adult self, not the child that I was. Yesterday as I left a job interview, I had a marvelous thought: this is my journey. This is my own precious life.

And I am free to choose what it looks like.

We’re all in the mood for a melody
And you’ve got us feelin’ alright