Speak, Memory. This is a song that played on the radio during the last years of my parents’ marriage. I don’t remember any specific memory, but when I hear the song–waiting on line at the drug store, through a car’s open window–I go back to the sadness of that time. It is a piece of my history, more lasting than the other fragments that I can barely remember: clothes, comic books, towels, silverware. A song is not a thing to own (and to risk losing) like a book or an album, it runs deeper. It doesn’t even matter if you like the tune or not. It’s there. And there is nothing to be done about it.