GET YOUR FEET BACK ON THE GROUND

I was standing in the lobby of the Südbahnhof in Vienna, waiting for Barbara. She’d stepped into the restroom to freshen up. It was a bright and ringing morning, the early light had a sparkling, crystalline quality to it as it poured through the glass walls of the station.

We were catching a train to Prague.

I was staring into space, entranced by the movement of people around me, and slowly I became aware that I was tapping out a rhythm on my teeth—an activity my dentist has continually warned me against—while a song played in my head.

I could hear a voice, in my inner ear, singing about living a little and being a gypsy and getting around with your feet back on the ground. Though these four bars of music go through my head periodically, I couldn’t remember where they were from at first, though I was certain they were being sung by Paul McCartney. I can hear his round-toned falsetto perfectly on my mental hi-fi, but is it from Band on the Run? Or Wild Life? These are albums I no longer listen to.

No, I realize, it’s a bit of Beatley nonsense from the end of a song called “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” on the album Ram.

I find the whole thing depressing. I’m forty-four, and I can barely bring to mind the sound of my mother’s voice. She’s been gone now for nearly twenty years. I can remember nothing of my high school Spanish and next to nothing of my college French. I had a hard time recently remembering an entire trip Barbara and I made to England. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of two women I was absolutely smitten with in college. I’ve forgotten entire episodes from every epoch of my life. There are people I was once close to who I might not recognize if I passed them on the street.

But somehow this piece of aural bubblegum, this pop nursery rhyme, this scatted little bit of Mother-Gooserai, which I heard for the first time nearly thirty-one years ago, plays faithfully in my head, probably—if the musicologists are to be believed—in the right key and at the right tempo, no matter where I am, even in a train station half a world away from home.

Paul McCartney probably doesn’t even remember these four bars—they sound like something he improvised in the studio—but I’ll be humming them, I know, for the rest of my life and probably on my deathbed, when I can remember nothing else, my teeth worn down to their nubs.