A song comes on my iTunes shuffle and immediately I'm taken out of my third floor apartment and swung back eight years, planted firmly back inside a feeling, a kind of longing, a wishing, a heart hurting yearning. So that suddenly past is present and what happened in Osaka, Japan that first year, those first months I lived there - the very end of the fall of 2001 - didn't stay in Japan but came right back up and crept in through my open living room windows this sunny summer day, confusing me all over again. Like I never grew up, and all the minor and the major things that have happened since have ceased to matter for the moment, for the length, at least, of a pop song. This like when some kid I knew in grade school (now grownup, usually with wife and child) bumps into me and says, 'Jonathan Mendelsohn' (no one but my grade school classmates calls me Jonathan) - the sheer shock of even having to resemble the person I was in junior high school. Oh how little things change. How much our experience will forever stay with us, to deal with, or ignore, and then have it sneak up on us in a song, for three, four minutes, taken back to a place, a place of distinct colour, smell, feeling, one you were so sure you firm slam turn tight put the lid on, with latches, a lid you bungy cord tied tight and everything. But it never ends, you know that. It's never finished. It is part of who you are. A big part, mind you. That's kind of a whole big part of what the novel's about, remember? Oh yeah. Who am I talking to now? Is it me, dear bloggy reader? Or you? It seems, for once, I've confused the two.
Fox in sox our game is done, sir. Thank you for a lot of confusion, sir.
ah, memories.
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