Went into the hills of Austin last night to hear music. Jeff Plankenhorn and Michael O’Connor. It was a good show. I was with a buddy from college. Jeff is new to my listening pleasure. I’ve heard Michael on several occasions. The first time was back in 2006 or 07. Can’t really place the date. He was with Adam Carroll at Anderson Fair in Houston. It was my first time for both. In addition to being a fine guitar player, Michael has a nice smokey voice, and my late wife was a fan of his.

That’s what I remembered last night as we sat in the chill evening air, the sound of her voice saying how much she liked his song Trampoline as we drove home from the show listening to his CD in the car. She had a good ear for music. I discovered that about a month after we’d gotten married in 1970. I brought home a new album from the newspaper where I was interning that summer. It was by a guy named Jesse Winchester. I put it on our turntable. I can still hear her voice from the upstairs bedroom of our two-story garage apartment, asking me who that was and telling me how much she liked him. I still have the album.

And there you have another snippet of the widow’s life, or the life of anyone left behind, maybe by divorce or just the ending of a relationship. A memory will pop up. A favorite song, a sound, a taste, who knows. They come unbidden. Flash around, trigger emotions, then disappear. Unstoppable. And who’d want to stop them? Not me. I’m past the days when they made me sad. Now I want them. Those were the good times, and I want to remember them, because they add a nice color to the present. And they inform the future and speak to what’s possible and sort of take the guesswork out of what sort of people you might like to hang with.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale