While shoveling on this Thanksgiving morning the Led Zeppelin song, "The Song Remains the Same," entered my head from memory.  Disconnected parts of it played in my mind's ear as I scraped the plastic shovel against ice and pavement.  Unfiltered winter sunlight made everything seem
white.  
     My brain's random selection of that song made as much sense as when any song enters one's head.  I was, in the 1980s, familiar on a listening basis with the song.  I knew the band's music well, I owned all their albums, I was very upset when I heard on the radio that Led Zeppelin's drummer John Bonham had died.  Led Zeppelin's music is stored intact in my memory, even though I haven't listened to it in many years. 
     It's a remarkable feature of music-related memory that one can recall in detail songs one hasn't heard in decades.  I've noticed this with smells, too.  When I worked in a library in the 1990s I checked out books for a woman wearing the same perfume a girlfriend of mine had worn sometimes in eleventh grade.  Do these interruptions of mundane experiences, like shoveling snow and working behind a desk in public, act to remind us of potent times in our lives when, since we were much younger, the possibilities were vaster? 
     Damned if I know.  I do know that sometimes a song popping into my head can become annoying if it sticks around too long, and after smelling the perfume on that woman in the library I spent the rest of my work shift thinking about that girl in high school.  She liked Led Zeppelin, and later became one of my many lost possibilities.

                                                                                Vic Neptune