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from their place among the A s and gazes at it as if it were a mirror reflecting his younger face. “Our favorite versions of ourselves are tied to music. ‘Whipping Post.’ ‘Ramble On.’ ‘Layla.’”
    â€œâ€˜It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.’”
    â€œI get it, I’m old! All right, in your case”—he assesses me—“some nineties grunge crap? Hootie? Or are you more of a residual eighties guy?”
    â€œAt least you didn’t say ‘Achy Breaky Heart.’”
    â€œMusic can be transporting…” He slides to the B s and riffles through the albums, a flip-deck animation of music eras from Basie to Butthole Surfers. “But they lose that power through familiarity. Now, when I hear Bowie sing ‘Changes,’ it’s impossible to go back to the time I first heard it, because it’s been painted over by all the times I’ve heard it since. It has no temporal resonance anymore. But ‘Eight Line Poem’? ‘Quicksand’? I’ve heard them infrequently enough over the years that I’ve got half a chance of tasting a moment from 1971.”
    He crosses to the facing stack of M s, practiced fingers dancing across record jacket edges, and randomly pulls Morrissey’s Viva Hate . He looks at it and me, assessing, believing he got it right.
    â€œI could play ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’ or ‘Suedehead,’ and you’d dig hearing it again.” He walks it over to the turntable. “But can it make you feel fifteen all over again? Nope. But this…”
    (The initial thud and scratchiness of the needle is nearly enough to take me back.)
    â€œHalf a chance.”
    He guesses right: I probably haven’t heard “Little Man, What Now?” since the year it was released, and with its opening drumbeat I can summon up everything about it and who I once was. Thirteen, I guess, with the billion great and infinitesimal shifts ahead that make a life but an adolescent’s sense of permanence—that I’d always be some version of this : likeable enough to have a crop of friends but still falling short of “popular,” good-looking enough to attract girls who only made me feel clumsy around them. Essentially, this brain, these thoughts … this me that would always love comic books and Nintendo and toaster pizza, housed in a fuller, elongated body better suited to adulthood. And with two arms.
    I can’t help but think about my three years of middle school, and the three years of high school that followed, years that felt like a lifetime. So why have the last three years been a blur? And why does it feel like the next three might already have happened before I can finish this thought?
    What became of you, indeed.
    A scant 1:49 later, memory gives way to currency: I’m stoned and tired from standing so long, both hungry and nauseous, the ringing in my ears has returned, and the place where my arm used to be hurts. In the millions of grooves on the thousands of records neatly stacked in hundreds of rows, there may be dozens of songs similarly capable of triggering more sense-memory … but none that could possibly make me better.
    I say good-bye to Mr. Madnick and thank him for not flunking me those years ago. Teetering outside, I see Fred Weber waiting outside the Four Corners with Dad, concern etched on his face, and I realize I now have another unforgivably cruel window escape to atone for.

 
    DAD
    Dad was a time traveler.
    Because we lived near the boundary between time zones, Dad went back and forth in time every day on his way to work. He had to get up at 5:00 A.M. to leave the house by 6:00 for the one-hour drive to work that, because it crossed from central time (here in Edgar County) into eastern time (there in Terre Haute), hurled him an hour into the future. He arrived at work at 8:00 so he could leave early enough to be home at 4:00 P.M. —