THIS IS US
My Memory Knows What It’s Doing
Notes on grief
I’ve been thinking about my memory lately. How it works and why it makes mistakes.
Every once in a while, for example, I hear a truck coming up our hill that growls and chuffs in the same register and pitch as my dad’s old maroon Ford, that dented dinosaur, and something tiny and impossible but nevertheless palpably real surges up in me — a minuscule stitch of time, momentarily lost, surfacing in the wrong place — and I think, Dad’s here! I forget, in that instant, that my dad passed away four years ago.
He loved John Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things.” The decisive, jaunty piano in the song’s first bars, then the rich, honeyed purr of the horn, how it tumbles merrily into runs and trills. I don’t think of my dad as a playful person, really, but he enjoyed the gaiety in that record, how Coltrane and his musicians unfurl it with such springing, coltish fun yet stay in the pocket, never fully slipping the borders of the song. There’s magic in that dexterous, both/and space, and a contradiction — we never lose the melody even though it’s barely played. We hear all the familiar notes even though they’re hardly there.
The song always makes me think of him. When it pops on unexpectedly, it’s 50/50 whether I will, for less than a microscopic…
