I’ve been listening to three albums a lot lately: High Violet by the National, The Suburbs by Arcade Fire, and Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Hardly sleeper hits, I know, but I have no ambition around music. You will never learn about anything new from me, or anything old and overlooked. I have a Pure Dork relationship to music. I know this because in third grade I had a tape of Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton singing “Islands in the Stream” and I wore that thing out. The Dream Machine on the un-earthquake-proof shelf above my bunkbed was permanently tuned to KSAN, Soft Country Favorites. I love the Cars and the Eagles and Puccini and Men at Work and the Bee Gees.

Late Bee Gees? My cousin asked once.

Totally.

I think I like those three albums so much because they all seem to be about how there is no real difference between being a child and being a teenager and being an adult. The terrors, hopes, mysteries and doldrums of childhood just sort of carry on. There are times when I want to ask and answer (or have someone else answer) the question, Did I have a happy childhood? But there’s something about that question that seems deliberately nostalgic and a cop-out. I have the same heart and lungs and stomach and spleen I had as a child. My arms and legs are the same. Only my hair and teeth are original to the later model. So why should my childhood, meaning the set of emotional and intellectual and physical experiences that constituted my life from birth to age twelve, remain distinct from my adolescence or adulthood, any more than my child’s body remains intact and distinct somewhere, boxed up along with my dolls?

This attempt to look at the past and make some sort of determination about it really feels like an effort to know what will happen in the future. By imagining a time when you were both yourself and a stranger, a distinct being, a character, about whom it is possible to conjecture, and assign feelings and motives, and whose fate you know, whose verdict you can read, what you really want to know is Will it be good? Will I be happy? Is there a future self I have yet to meet, an old self who is at peace? Will there be a time before I die when I will know, definitively, who I am and how I lived, and can accept the knowledge without longing or mourning?

I used to think of the past as a box I could open. I could examine the contents. I even touched things from time to time, moved them around to fit some idea I mistook for a memory. But I just spent the weekend with a beloved five year old. The whole time when I might have been thinking, You are just like I was at that age, I was thinking instead, I am just like you now. And then I had this thought like a brief, sweet transmission from the future: for all your sorrow and all your joy, little one, you will never be a stranger to yourself.