I knew the song playing on the radio, but that didn’t mean I remembered the name, or could figure it out, especially since I’d caught only one line of the chorus. I was on my way from La Pola to Valladolid for a footrace, listening to KISS-FM, which in Spain, as in the United States, plays ’80s and ’90s hits. I recognized most of the songs, but this one I would go crazy trying to place. So I Shazammed it.
Shazam will identify a song in seconds, giving the exact title and performer. Tap the icon, and like magic, the uncertainty vanishes. One day we might be able to Shazam our own thoughts to clarify them quickly, but for now, the app records a snippet of music and compares it to … everything in its archive. It works remarkably well.
This is what your brain does as well, only with a smaller backlog and a longer processing time. In a grocery store in Houston, Texas, way back in the early 2000s, I heard a song playing that I knew somehow but couldn’t pin down. I didn’t know the artist or the title, or even where I’d heard it before, and the frustration quickly ate into my pleasure at recognizing it.
In the grocery store, all my emotion was concentrated on one question. I was pure focus and determination, trying to delve deeply enough into the multiple layers of my accumulating life to release the memory. Would it come slowly bubbling up to the surface? Or would it burst out, almost with a life of its own? Maybe neither, because after two whole minutes of gritting my teeth in concentration, I had nothing.
I found an employee stocking shelves in the next aisle. “Excuse me,” I said, and he paused over his stack of cornflakes boxes and looked up inquiringly.
“That song that’s playing, what is it?”
His expression changed. Already his brain was working. “Could be Coldplay,” he said, naming a band.
The name meant almost nothing to me. “What’s the name of the song?”
He concentrated. The music was already dying away. “I’m not sure,” he said. Then after the last notes, “No, I don’t know.”
The next time I heard the song, I paid better attention and caught enough of the lyrics to figure out the title. Or maybe my brain was working better. “Clocks” is the name, Coldplay the band. “Closing walls and ticking clocks” are the words to remember.
Title, band, and stocker—that pleasant freckled guy in his 20s with smooth pale skin—have all stayed with me. The long empty aisles of the supermarket, too, and my hurried glance down the one adjacent to mine for someone to ask. My mother was around a corner, with the grocery list and the cart. My grandmother, attending church while we picked up a few things. She was still living in her own home but soon moved into a retirement facility, where a few years later, she died. All these elements, including my grandmother’s slow decline—all part of how I remember that morning in Houston, coloring the picture, deepening the shadows, shrinking the frame. Even the song heard on the radio halfway to a footrace these many years later, on a late-winter’s day, all flow into that moment in the past. Who says you can’t step in the same river twice?
But time is not a river. It’s a deep lake, an ever-expanding reservoir. As it widens and deepens and brims with new experiences, distances grow, events seem to shift place. Things align differently. The past bunches up, or spreads out. My last visit to Houston to see my grandmother before she moved into the retirement home was several years before Coldplay recorded the song I heard in the grocery store. The stocker probably did not yet work at the store. By the time the song was on the airways, my grandmother was not planning her move into the retirement home—she was already there.
Nevertheless, I remember what I remember. It’s all real, though it can’t be. That’s the wonder of it. Black is the stage name of the writer and singer of the song I Shazammed. That song is “Wonderful Life,” from 1987, and it presents a sad and difficult moment of Black’s life that, in his flat melancholy voice, he sarcastically calls wonderful. “Alone again” he intones, and “it’s so unfair.” But he also sings of sunshine, gulls, and dreams. “It’s a wonderful, wonderful life.”
It is wonderful, you feel, listening. The song was a hit and turned Black’s fortunes around, for a while. One critic called his lyrics “oddly uplifting.” That is a phrase, paired with melancholy, I hope to remember. Melancholy because the song brought a day in Houston back to me again. The day, like a few notes in a song, suggested the whole visit, even years of visits.
And then oddly uplifting? That’s also for the song, the freckled stock boy pausing in his work to listen, and all the rest of my life sunk in that deep lake.
