They were played in no particular order and with no particular significance, but they did remind him of moments when he had heard each of them before. In a coffee shop, on the way to work or in the elevator, or at the dentist's. They were those kinds of songs, adaptable and hummable.
It made him pause to reflect if any of the songs were very recent. Those were the ones he had not thought ready for this group yet, but then Bobby Darin would come on singing, Somewhere, beyond the sea...
And then he was somewhere, beyond the sea, maybe Ipanema, or maybe just somewhere in his own past when Astrud Gilberto told him of a boy who walked on that beach.
Strange, how all these songs evoked wistful memories with nary a happy moment among them. Happy times were always somewhere else, and not just around the corner, but perhaps as far away as beyond the sea.
He thought of one night in particular, when, as a preteenager, he had been left alone and he had frightened himself with his imagination. He pulled out a notebook that night and tried to exorcise his fear by writing about it in a fictional framework. He wrote his first story then, though it was not the first one published. In fact, it was never published, but he always kept that notebook somewhere within reach. It contained a few short works, a quick reading of which would easily humble him whenever he lost his grounding. He felt the notebook expressed some of his sense of futility.
