Broken Hearted Melody

An old friend writes about discovering her late mother’s identity, trying to understand who she was besides being her mom. I feel connected to her text because I am going through a similar quest, aiming to answer the same family history questions. But this resonation is not surprising. It is quite ordinary that we would finally address the reasons why we feel and act the way we do at this time when we’ve reached a level of conscience beyond the years we thought we were invincible and needed no one. We begin to see now how we have incorporated everyone that crossed our paths into our individual expressions. I’m always in awe of words that can trigger a trip through space and time like this. Emily Dickinson wrote “Blossoms will run away,/Cakes reign but a Day,/But Memory like Melody/Is pink Eternally.” Coincidentally, my daughter sends me a song by Chronixx I really liked and in it I heard “Memory is in the heart.” What a concept it is to house memories in the heart, the ultimate boss of relevance! It makes total sense that the people who fill our hearts with love are always fresh in our memories, “eternally pink.” Then the heart is such a roomy organ, because obviously that’s where Groove is! But what else lives there? How many melodies? I can’t pretend that science has not proven that memory is a function of the hippocampus, but perhaps the heart is the songwriter and the brain is but a performer, or it could even be one step removed, the muse for the writing of the memory song.