vibrant ovenbird It’s the memories from long ago that are vivid now, my father says. It’s almost eerie, the way they arise, as if they just happened. Where once they were faded afterimages of a lost time, now they are in fully restored technicolour. He keeps getting flashes of his childhood that intrude insistently. He can’t even be sure the memories are real, although he assumes they must be. He slips into the past. Every store used to have a record section, he tells me. He can remember wandering into Woolworths downtown with a roll of Centennial dimes given to him by his father. He spent those dimes on a Paul McCartney album for a girl he loved. It didn’t win her affection. But in the moment, that album was worth more than those commemorative dimes ever could be. He once had a chance to buy a copy of Yesterday and Today by the Beatles with the original cover before it was recalled. The image showed The Beatles in white butcher smocks covered in blood and raw meat and pieces of decapitated baby dolls. He wishes he had had $5 in his pocket to buy that album when he saw it because it’s a valuable collectors item now. He remembers how he used to run into my mother on the bus sometimes, before they were anything to each other. It was fate, he says, laughing. Or it was proximity, he concedes. He remembers a day when I was small. Just a baby. A Loreena McKennitt concert was airing on the radio. She performed with The Men of the Deeps. My father sat in the living room in front of the stereo with all the lights turned down. He held me in his lap and listened to the radio host describe the way The Men of the Deeps entered the concert hall in complete darkness, with just the light of their headlamps breaking through the cavernous black. Like glow worms, the commentator said. How he wished he could have seen that, my father says. And I find that I can almost form a memory in my own mind of this exact thing, as if the description entered my barely formed mind and made a home for itself there, more than forty years ago. I can see the bob of the headlamps, the coal blackened faces of the miners. I can feel the miracle of it—these men subjected to a subterranean hell, their lungs coated with carbon, somehow finding a way to sing, their lights bouncing off of each other’s eyes. Did I see this once, on television, when I was older? Or did my father’s memory become my own? Maybe as you age and death draws nearer your life really does flash before your eyes, but not in the way we expect, not all in a rush at the moment of your last breath. Maybe it comes back in fragments, over the course of years, memories like movies in the mind, more present than they ever were, polished and patched up and new. Maybe you get to hold hands with the loves that slipped away and listen to Led Zeppelin for the first time and experience the freedom of a Sunday that asks nothing of you. Maybe you get to feel the weight of your baby’s head against your shoulder one more time. 260530 what's it to you? who go blather from