A Memoir of Flutes, Feelings, and Coming Full Circle
Setting: August 2023 — The summer Holden fell for Celine and I relived 1997.
My parents always said they spent hundreds of dollars for me to learn to play “My Heart Will Go On” on the piano. It was my big recital song, months of lessons leading up to one minute on the church stage.
I never practiced. Not once.
So imagine my surprise when Holden, at five, took a sudden interest in the Titanic. He couldn’t pronounce it quite right, but he could rattle off facts like a tiny tour guide. He even had a captain’s hat and a shirt that proudly declared: Just a Boy Who Loves the Titanic.
Then he discovered the song.
“Can you play the Titanic song?” he’d ask. And then again. And again. Every day for weeks.
And I, a millennial mom who lived through the 1997 Titanic obsession in real time, complied. Naturally. Because who am I to deny Celine Dion?
So I’d cue it up.
The opening flute. The tragic yearning. The ocean of childhood feelings that floods in like the iceberg itself. Instantly, I’m back on my bedroom floor, surrounded by notebooks and folders, carefully writing "I ❤️ Leo" in the margins like it meant something, like I was part of it somehow.
The song would end, and Holden’s voice would follow, right on cue:
“Can you play it again?”
I’d sigh. I’d hit play. Again.
And again.
Eventually, the phase passed. But every now and then, when I hear that familiar flute, I still think of him — a little boy in a captain’s hat, the ghost of my own childhood looping softly behind him while he asks for it on repeat.
Some things, it seems, really do go on… and on.
This post is part of my One-Minute Memoir series — short reflections on small moments that still manage to say something big.
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