TELL ME ABOUT THE RADIO

You get to an age, or experience level, where every song has a story stuck to it. It’s carry-on baggage, heavy enough to make you feel lopsided for the whole three minutes. You spin the dial— well, there aren’t any dials anymore, we left grooved, twiddly things in the 20th century but you know what I mean, the dial— and you can’t find a song that doesn’t make you wince. Maybe this is just my problem. Maybe I’ve done too much.

I didn’t need to dance naked in a club where skin flashed blue and pink in time with “She Hates Me” by Puddle of Mudd. I didn’t need to collect records in my twenties so I’d know about all the bands that preceded me on Earth, even the bad ones like Looking Glass and Air Supply that I didn’t actually like, but wanted to understand. Now I can’t hear “Playground in my Mind” without being dropped back into the summer of 2008, when I made a playlist of easy-listening ‘70s gold, and my friend in the Hills heated her black bottom pool up to a hundred degrees almost every night. It must have cost a fortune, but I don’t remember that being discussed. I turned a lot of people on to “On and On” by Stephen Bishop that summer as we swam in the very warm water and talked about how hard it is to control bamboo once you’ve planted it. There was a lesson in there, but I was still too young to see it.

Sometimes the associations pile up: The other day I was in my car and “Time After Time,” by Cyndi Lauper came on. First, I thought of being in kindergarten, when the eighth graders at my school voted for that song as the best of the year. (I agreed with them then, and still do, but why do I remember this so vividly? I was five.) Then, I remembered that it was one of the songs featured at my wedding, my second wedding. It played during the traditional groom-and-mother dance; I remember selecting the song, but I can’t remember the actual dance. The third memory that came into my mind was when Cyndi Lauper herself handed me a Tony during my extremely weird musical theater era. After I stammered through a speech, I remember turning to Cyndi and Wayne Brady and trying to start a conversation with them, but their faces made me realize that we were supposed to get off the stage. Sometimes when I am in an extraordinarily stressful situation my brain will decide we are safe and try to do something inappropriately normal. That’s what happened.