Time Capsule Tunes

Listened to a couple “time capsule” songs. One shouldn’t break them out too frequently or you’ll obliterate the original memories. Like a fossil unexposed to the elements for a thousand years and then ruined by the shock of air and light. Most nostalgia songs get ruined that way, like how “Sweet Caroline” got associated with Red Sox games. 

But if a song is preserved in amber well enough they can time-travel you. First up was some Clint Black circa 1989 singing “Better Man”.  Simpler time although I wouldn’t have believed it back then. After he sang it on Oprah’s show she was interviewing Black about how he became a better man after he sang it. 

A chance mention of Solzhenitsyn on a Catholic pod today led me to pick up The Gulag again and the great Russian soul writes of the familiar refrain, “It’s a mistake!”, which was the plaintive cry of those who were innocent but taken to the camps. 

Somehow the Gulag feels a primer of coming attractions, although probably after I’m gone. But time moves fast and the intolerance faster. 

That phrase triggered another distant memory: the Men at Work song.  I found it online and within a few seconds was magically listening to a song I hadn’t heard in maybe three or four decades?  I got the vibes of exactly where I was at the time the song was a hit and wikipedia confirmed the date in memory exactly.  Youth is a time so intense that it burns in memory while who can remember what happened to you at 40 versus 47?  Unless there was a searing event involved. 

It’s odd how sensitive I was during one of those intervening years to the deaths of people I didn’t really know.  They hit me hard and in succession.  William F. Buckley, John Updike, Richard Neuhaus and Michael Dubruiel. I actually met two of them however briefly (Neuhaus & Dubruiel), but when all of these distant heroes, to a greater or lesser extent, died, well... (Buckley’s death was made worse by my having read his son’s memoir of his last years.  Not cheery.)

Perhaps I was too cavalier about death (that it happened to strangers mostly) and too sensitive to its sting (as in not being able to say, “Death, where is thy sting?” with St. Paul).  As the old professor said, “everything happens for a reason.”  And my Uncle Tom, “This too shall pass.”