Washington, D.C., January 1, 2009
It was after 5:00 when the planetarium at the Air and Space Museum let out and I wanted to get to the National Portrait Gallery before it closed at 5:30. I wanted to copy down a quote from Kurt Vonnegut that I’d read on my first day here. At the time it didn’t seem significant enough to write down, but it had continued to echo and deepen in my thoughts since then and I realized I needed it as a linch-pin for something I wanted to talk about. It was hung beside one of Vonnegut’s self portraits in the entry hall gallery of the museum, and if I wanted to see it again, it would have to be tonight, because this was going to be my last day on this side of town. So I had it all mapped out: I would see “Cosmic Collisions” at the planetarium, then take a quick walk to the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden to shoot a couple of photos of the mirrored sculpture and reflecting pool, then cross town to the National Gallery, then stop at Barnes and Noble for the text of “Twelfth Night,” then catch dinner, and get back to the hotel about time to go to sleep. But taking the photos took longer than I planned, so I was walking briskly up 7th Avenue when I realized I was hearing a song by Fleetwood Mac in my head. It wasn’t one of their biggest hits, and I had to sing it to the chorus to recognize it as “Tusk.”
Why won’t you tell me
what’s going on?
Why won’t you tell me
who is on the phone?
That was an interesting choice for my brain to make, I thought, as I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard the song. I was almost certain I didn’t have a copy of it. Would it be on a live CD of theirs that I had? I doubt it, so the last time I would have heard it would have been something on the radio, and I hadn’t listened to the radio in over twenty years. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been playing at any of my friends’ houses, so it must have playing on the radio when I was in a restaurant or out shopping, or maybe from a passing car or a storefront. But I found it strange that a song I could barely remember had burned itself so deeply into my brain that it had begun playing on its own. Or was there a library of songs in my head that my brain pulled out for its own reasons? Maybe I associate the song with something I’ve just seen, or maybe the rhythm I was walking was the same as the one in that song? The song had a marching band playing on it, and I was amazed that I could even recreate the horn charts. Can a songwriter create a song that will do that on purpose, I wondered, and if they could do it once, why couldn’t they do it over and over again, at will? The Beatles rarely released a single that wasn’t a hit throughout their entire career but they were never as successful as solo artists. And it’s hard to remember now but Ringo Starr was the first ex-Beatle to begin cranking out #1 singles, and then it was George Harrison. Paul had a good run with Wings, and John had an occasional success, but was mostly….
And I realized I’d walked almost an entire block past the National Gallery, but instead of turning around, I decided to walk to the end of the block and circle around to get back to the museum. And as I turned the corner I saw a huge video screen in front of the Verizon Center advertising Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits Tour 2009, and I realized that a lot of what seems like synchronicities in my life are just experiences in the future that are so powerful they send reverberations back into the past.
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