One day, the air is a bit warmer, and the sky is not so blindingly bright. I’m walking through a forested park with my children. My son points out two squirrels racing up an immense American sycamore tree, its white bark peeling in patches, its leaves bigger than dinner plates. I think, God, that’s a beautiful tree. It must be a hundred years old, maybe more.

Later, I’ll go home and read up on sycamores and learn that there are sycamore trees alive today that date back more than three hundred years, trees that are older than the nation that claims them. I’ll learn that George Washington once measured a sycamore tree that was nearly forty feet in circumference, and that after deserting the British Army in the eighteenth century, brothers John and Samuel Pringle lived for over two years in the hollowed-out trunk of a sycamore tree in what is now West Virginia.

I’ll learn that twenty-four hundred years ago, Herodotus wrote that the Persian king Xerxes was marching his army through a grove of sycamore trees when he came across one of “such beauty that he was moved to decorate it with golden ornaments and to leave behind one of his soldiers to guard it.”

But for now I’m just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned air and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, and I realize that I am in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I feel the solace of that shade, the relief it provides. And that’s the point.

My son grabs my wrist, pulling my gaze from the colossal tree to his thin-fingered hand. “I love you,” I tell him. I can hardly get the words out.

I give sycamore trees five stars.

“NEW PARTNER”

HEARTBREAK is not really so different from falling in love. Both are overwhelming experiences that unmoor me. Both burst with yearning. Both consume the self. I think that’s what the Palace Music song “New Partner” is about. But I’m not sure.

“New Partner” has been my favorite song not by the Mountain Goats for over twenty years now, but I’ve never been able to make sense of the lyrics. One couplet goes, “And the loons on the moor, the fish in the flow / And my friends, my friends still will whisper hello.” I know that means something; I just don’t know what. This is soon followed by a line equally beautiful and baffling: “When you think like a hermit, you forget what you know.”

Palace Music is one of the many incarnations of Will Oldham, who sometimes records under his own name and sometimes as the dandyish Bonnie Prince Billy. I like a lot of his songs; he sings about religion and longing and hope in ways that resonate with me, and I love how his voice often seems on the edge of cracking open.

But “New Partner” is not just a song for me. It’s a kind of magic, because it has the ability to transport me to all the moments I’ve heard that song before. For three minutes and fifty-four seconds, it makes me into people I used to be. Through the song I am brought back both to heartbreak and to falling in love with enough distance to see them as something more than opposites. In “The Palace,” Kaveh Akbar writes that “Art is where what we survive survives,” and I think that’s true not only of the art we make, but also of the art we love.

Like any magic, you have to be careful with a magical song—listen to it too often, and it will become routine. You’ll hear the chord changes before they come, and the song will lose its ability to surprise and teleport you. But if I’m judicious with a magical song, it can take me back to places more vividly than any other form of memory.

* * *

I’m twenty-one. I’m in love, and I’m on a road trip to visit distant relatives of mine who live in and around the tiny town where my grandmother grew up. My girlfriend and I pull into a McDonald’s parking lot in Milan, Tennessee, and then we stay in the car for a couple of minutes listening to the end of “New Partner.”

It’s spring, and we’re driving south, and when we get out of the car after the song ends, we discover that our long-sleeve T-shirts are no longer necessary. I scrunch my sleeves up and feel the sun on my forearms for the first time in months. At the pay phone inside McDonald’s, I call the number my mom has given me, and a quivering voice answers, “Hello?”

I explain that her cousin, Billie Grace, is my grandmother. The woman says, “Roy’s daughter?” And I say yes. And she says, “You’re saying you’re kin to Billie Grace Walker,” and I say yes, and she says, “So you’re saying you’re kin to me,” and I say yes, and then my distant relative, Bernice, says, “Well, then come on over!”

* * *

I’m twenty-two, working as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, newly and quite miserably single. I’ve just finished forty-eight consecutive hours on call. It’s been a rough couple of days. Leaving the hospital, I can’t believe how bright it is outside, or how alive the air feels. I get into my car and stare for a while at the parents and kids walking in and out. I play “New Partner” on my car’s tape player.

A child had died for no reason the night before—sudden infant death syndrome, a disease that in its name acknowledges our ignorance of it and powerlessness before it. He was a beautiful baby, and he was gone. His mother had asked me to baptize him. In my faith tradition, you’re not supposed to baptize the dead, but then again, babies aren’t supposed to die. He was the first person I ever baptized. His name was Zachary, a name taken from Hebrew words meaning, “God remembers.”

* * *

I’m twenty-eight, newly married, living in a basement in Chicago with almost no furniture. I’m in the midst of a series of oral surgeries to try to repair my mouth after a bike accident, and I’m in pain all the time. The pain is maddening—I’m trying to start work on a new novel, but all I can write is a series of stories in which a young man tries increasingly absurd strategies for pulling out all his teeth.

I remember lying in a borrowed bed in that apartment, listening to “New Partner” to calm myself down, staring at the ancient ceiling tiles with their tea-colored water stains that looked like continents on another world’s map. Sometimes, the song will take me back there so viscerally that I can smell the antibiotic mouthwash I gargled with while the wound in my mouth was still open. I can even feel the pain in my jaw, but in a way that feels survivable as things only can once you’ve survived them.

* * *

I’m thirty-two. I have a baby of my own now. I knew, of course, that the act of becoming a father does not suddenly make you qualified for the work, but still, I can’t believe this child is my responsibility. Henry is only a couple months old, and I’m still terrified by the idea of being someone’s dad, of how utterly he depends upon me, when I know myself to be profoundly undependable.

I roll the word father around in my head all the time. Father. What a loaded gun of a word. I want to be kind and patient, unhurried and unworried. I want him to feel secure in my arms. But I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve literally read more books about Hamlet than I’ve read about parenting. He won’t stop crying even though I’ve changed his diaper and offered him a bottle. I’ve tried swaddling and shushing and swinging and singing, but nothing works.

Why is he crying? Maybe there is no why, but my brain needs a why. I’m so incompetent, so quick to frustration, so totally unprepared for every facet of this. A baby’s cries are piercing—it feels as if they cut through you. Finally, unable to get him to stop crying, I put him in his car seat and rock him slowly, stick earbuds in my ears, and turn “New Partner” up as loud as I can, so I can hear Will Oldham’s plaintive wailing instead of my son’s.

* * *

I’m forty-one. For Sarah and me, the song now sounds like being in love all those years ago, when we were each other’s new partners, and it also sounds like our love now. It’s a bridge between that life and this one. We’re playing “New Partner” for our now nine-year-old son for the first time, and Sarah and I can’t help but smile a little giddily at each other. We start dancing together slowly in the kitchen despite our son’s gagging noises, and we sing along, Sarah on-key and me way off-. At the end of the song, I ask my son if he liked it and he says, “A little.”

That’s okay. He’ll have a different song. You probably have a different one, too. I hope it carries you to places you need to visit without asking you to stay in them.

I give “New Partner” five stars.

THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE

     August Sander, Young Farmers, 1914. Pictured, left to right: Otto Krieger, August Klein, and Ewald Klein.

MOST DAYS, I walk past a vertical strip of four photographs featuring Sarah and me. The pictures were taken at a photo booth in Chicago in 2005, just a couple of weeks after we got engaged. It’s standard photo booth fare—smiles, silly faces, and so on—but the light was good, and we were young.