Music Lessons: This Is Your Life, The Mix Tape

A few weeks ago I was lying in bed in a hotel room in Galveston, Texas , falling asleep to my XM satellite radio, when I decided to spend some time on the '40s station. I was looking for the oldest music I could find. Weird, I know.

But, I've become obsessed with time lately, constantly crunching the numbers to get some sense of where I stand in the continuum. How will future historians describe my tenure on earth? How will I be remembered? As an iconoclastic, Minotaur-obsessed prophet? As a capricious, narcissistic power broker? Will I be recalled as a fighter, a poet, or a preacher? (And how will my ability to remember the second verse of Bon Jovi's "Lay Your Hands on Me" impact that designation?) These, obviously, are fascinating questions.

I instantly thought of my dad, not because dirt was new when he was born, but because he would be able to call out the artist and title of every song that played as if they were hits today. Then I wondered, where in his life was he when he first heard Art Mooney's "Bluebird of Happiness"?

So I sent him an e-mail. "I would love to hold a mix CD of the songs you remember most from your youth," I wrote. "Would you think about it and tell me some names and titles?"

"How cool would that be for me to fall asleep to a record of all the tunes my dad loved growing up?" I thought.

The more I thought about it, the more I needed to have it. Your life's soundtrack is your fingerprint, tracing all the individual way points, taking into account all the curveballs, surprises, glories and heartbreaks.

Dad wrote me back the next morning. "The first song that I can remember hearing is 'The Music Goes 'Round and Around,' by Tommy Dorsey. ('I blow through here/the music goes round and round/whoa-ho-ho-ho/and it comes out here.') My first record was 'Tales from the Vienna Woods.' I bought it secondhand, and it had a crack in it. When I hear the song played now, I still unconsciously expect it to repeat over and over at the point of the crack."

So I went to iTunes and downloaded both. I won't tell you what they sound like, because it won't mean anything to you. You have to know my dad. But I can tell you this: All the megapixels in the universe won't capture what asking your parents for a list of the music that moves them can. I'm nine minutes into "Tales from the Vienna Woods" and I can smell the house my father was born in. And with more of his memories to come, I can't stop crunching the numbers.