You know I’m fascinated with memory and how the mind works. I wrote a column here not long ago about how all memories are false. You should go check it out. Still, memory exists for a reason – and it doesn’t work like we think it does. Sometimes it stretches, bends, manufactures… and sometimes it just drops out on us. Have you ever had a fragment of a whisp of a strand of a memory that you just… can’t… grasp?

For most of my life, I have had a memory of someone important dying when I was 10 years old. It shook me. At ten years old, I knew that people died, of course, because both of my grandfathers were dead, but this was someone dying that really rocked me. I remember crying about it in my bed and then going to my parent’s room and telling them I didn’t want them to die ever. I remember being scared about it and thinking how can this important, famous person die?

However traumatic it was, later in my life, no matter how hard I tried, I could never remember who it was that died. It was like my mind had blocked out only the identity of the person. The rest of the feelings and emotions were still there. And here’s the weird thing (you knew it would get interesting, right?)… my brain somehow attached the Barry Manilow song I Write the Songs to that death. I mean, Barry Manilow didn’t die when I was 10, in fact, at this writing, he’s still alive. Still, somehow those two things: that mysterious death and the song I Write the Songs were attached in my brain.

Then a year or so ago I was in a thrift store picking through some vinyl records and I saw a Guy Lombardo album. Man! I remember Guy Lombardo! We watched him every year for New Year’s Eve. This was before Dick Clark and New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. I remember as a child getting to stay up and watch Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians play big band music from a ritzy ballroom in New York City. Like the Waldorf Hotel or something. Fancy. Me lying on the floor and loving that music. I still love it today. Anyway, I bought the album and went home and listened to it. Memories came flooding back and I had to look up Guy Lombardo online. Well, you guessed it… He died in 1977. When I was 10 years old.

Oh my goodness, I thought, could this be it? The death that happened when I was ten years old that hit me so hard?

I went on YouTube and watched some of the videos from his New Year’s Eve shows and I particularly watched the one from New Year’s Eve 1977, the year he died. Guess what? They did a Guy Lombardo version of Barry Manilow’s I Write the Songs on that show on that night. The year Guy Lombardo died. No doubt about it. Yep. That was it. Then the whole memory was just reconstructed and there it was. I was devastated by the death of Guy Lombardo at age 10.

You see how that is? Like a misfiled document, someday you’re rifling through looking for something else and you find a gem you didn’t know you needed. Because of this exercise in reconstructing a memory, I now very vividly remember lying on a comfy carpet watching Guy Lombardo on New Year’s Eve.

What do you remember?

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.