image by Anita Jankovic

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 dextrous, 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 instant, think I should call my dad and say hey. Before that thought has even fully concluded, I am already remembering: I can’t.

It’s strange and not exactly pleasant to be slapped out of the present moment and then back into it, boomeranged hard and fast between then and now.

Why does my brain do this?

Four years without my dad, and here’s what I think: My memory is trying to reveal something to me about the enormity of love. It’s trying to tell me that big losses are incorporated slowly, very slowly and bit by bit, and never all the way. That it takes deep reams of time for any of us to truly get that something, or someone, is over, is gone — and even then, we might sometimes briefly fail to recall this fact. In our love for them, we might falter.

My memory is trying to tell me that the choreography of time is full of glitches about which we can do nothing, and maybe should do nothing. That glitches are part of the extraordinary project. That glitches can be revelatory; that memory is a spontaneous improvisation, and sometimes it plays the “wrong” notes. Notes that are anachronistic, not part of the current song. Because that is how it feels, these flashes of evocative error — as if I’ve just heard a discordant note that interrupts the melody of the present. And it stings. It’s a nick on the heart. It isn’t fun to briefly forget and then remember that someone you love is dead.

I listened to the record today, John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things. I listened five or six times. I could picture my dad bopping his head to the playfulness. He knew it by heart. As do I. As does probably everyone who loves the song.

And what a feat! To remember every off-kilter, unexpected, gorgeously rogue note and chord and riff, sounds that don’t hew to the facts of the sheet music, but are nevertheless true. Sounds that are, even though they are not strictly meant to be here. Even though they should not, according to the songwriter, exist. And yet there we were, me and my dad, both listening decades ago; and yet here I am, listening today, thinking of my dad.

The song summons him out of nowhere, just like these glitches of memory do. And I suppose, in the end, I wouldn’t give them up, uncomfortable though they are — thinking of him is now all I have. The chance to bring him to mind — to feel in my body, for even a tiny pinch of a second, what it was like to hear him arrive at my house, or to know he was about to answer the phone with hey, hon! — that is priceless, even if it’s “wrong,” even if it stings. My memory, I think, knows what it’s doing.

My memory is trying to tell me that the present and the past collide unexpectedly, cymbals of time glinting in the light of our consciousness. The collisions are so insistent I sometimes wonder whether in some other realm of the universe the past isn’t actually over. Maybe the past is the future there, new notes, unwritten, unplayed, sounding in ears I can’t imagine. Whether, if we could zoom out far enough, we’d sweep our hands across the surface and be surprised, even overjoyed, by what they gathered.