Sunday, April 23, 2017

The Different Realities of Memory



I heard a song on the radio earlier this week, and I was immediately transported to a boat in the middle of an almost frozen lake, with snow on the rocky shore and the wet tang of an approaching storm in the air. It was a wonderful memory. But it never existed.
The song was from a OneRepublic album that I listened to repeatedly when I was writing the first part of The Branson Beauty. My sheriff has to coordinate the rescue of passengers from a crashed showboat in the middle of an Ozark lake as a winter storm blows in.
Table Rock Lake, Branson, Missouri. Credit: Table Rock Condos at The Majestic
I hadn’t heard any of the songs in years. But as I listened to "Made For You" play on the car radio, everything came back. Not the actual memory of me sitting at a keyboard and staring at a computer screen. What I recalled was the cold and the water and the feeling of expectancy that my character had as he boarded the showboat in the biting wind. That’s my "real" memory, and it made me smile for the rest of the day.
What songs do you have that are linked to a specific memory – whether it’s from the real world or the world of a book?  

 

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