Posted Mar 20, 2024
I have a Brian Wilson concert ticket pinned to the bulletin board above me. I was young, old enough to keep the ticket (my first concert ticket), but not old enough to have a solid memory of the show itself. When I recall that night, the only thing that comes to me is exiting the music hall (it was at Hershey) and seeing long, long tables of merchandise. My parents asked if I wanted something, and pointed out a green baseball cap with a vinyl record embroidered in the front.
They ended up buying me the hat, and I've had it ever since. It's funny, now that I think about it, not having a single memory of that concert, and yet the cap still means something to me. Memorabilia with no memory to serve, what's the point of that?
I wore the thing a fair bit before I transitioned a few years down the road. Looking at it now, it's pretty dusty, but I can still make out the marks of when I adorned it with a pin given to me by a flight attendant. The pin was a pair of plastic wings painted gold, and I don't have it anymore, but I've still got the hat.
The thing has taken such a backseat in my memory, in my mental catalog of "stuff" I remotely care about, that I'm not even sure if I brought it with me to Germany. The last, and only time, the hat was brought to the forefront of my mind was just this past summer.
I'd been in line waiting for the self-checkout at Giant, my hands clutching two bags of (very old) candy gummy sharks[1] I needed for a party. I noticed that the person in front of me, a young, short man with light hair and quick, nervous eyes, was wearing a green Brian Wilson hat with a record in front.
What followed was a brief, awkward conversation about his tour and a concert I pretended to remember, at some point in which I said something about Wilson and McCartney being immortal, or something like that. Spots freed up, I bought my gummy sharks, and I went home to my party.