Time Passages

I was out and about running errands today, and so I took the opportunity to tune into AT40 on the 70s station. They were airing the show from this week in 1979, which was oddly coincidental since earlier in the day I had listened to an album by Dan Fogelberg which one of my roommates played over and over again when we were doing our winter term in St. Moritz in January of 1979. 

I confess that I think of that idyllic resort town more often than you might expect. Despite the fact that I never learned to ski, and avoiding that requirement was rather fraught each of the three Januaries I spent there, I have St. Moritz as one of the places on my weather app, and I check in every few months. 

I hadn't heard the Fogelberg album in at least 40 years, but I put it on when Apple music played "Run for the Roses" as part of a Linda Ronstadt station it was generating. When he sang, "It's the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance," I was hooked by the antimetabole and was curious to revisit the Nether Land album that Amy played so faithfully those two weeks.

Not three days ago, another friend from high school texted me with a question about that January term, and last Sunday when I was getting a massage, all I could think about was St. Moritz: the snow packed streets, the hot chocolate, the ski bahn, the hotel, the classes, the gerstensuppe, the cross country ski instructor (Ooplah! she said when we fell, Come, ve go, she said at the beginning of every lesson; it was weird. 

After my massage, I checked the snowpack and the webcams to see how the season was unfolding there. The main mountain, Piz Nair, is some 5,000 feet above sea level, and so this year at least, Corviglia and Corvatsch have avoided the green pistes that other lower altitude alpine resorts have suffered.

And now, here I was this afternoon hearing the 40 most popular songs of the last week I ever spent there. And there was one last nutty coincidence. The last time I listened to the Top 40 was on the way home from the beach at Thanksgiving. My sister and Heidi and I rode together through the fields of the eastern shore nd sang along to the hits from that week in 1978. Well, some of those songs were still on the countdown today, because that was the same timeline, just eight weeks earlier.

And the number one song today? "Le Freak".

Fitting, I suppose.