♫ Try to Remember ♪: The Song We Keep Forgetting
Field Note: on memory, scars, and the kind of September that lingers.
Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh, so mellow… Harry Belafonte sang it like nobody else. Jerry Orbach was the first to perform it off Broadway. Ed Ames hit the charts in 1965. Gladys Knight & the Pips carried it into the seventies. Even in Australia, where I now live, New World reached the charts in 1968. It’s a classic, a pure piece of musical nostalgia. You may not know the song instantly, but chances are you’ve heard echoes of it. In a voice, a season, or a memory.
But either way, here’s what many forget: it isn’t a stand-alone ballad. It’s the opening of a musical, The Fantasticks, the longest-running off-Broadway show in history.
The Fantasticks borrows its shape from Edmond Rostand’s Les Romanesques. Rostand? Yes, that one. The same playwright who gave us Cyrano de Bergerac. His movement was realism, a commitment to telling the truth about love and longing, not just the fantasy.
The musical makes this plain: “Without a hurt, the heart is hollow.” That single line carries a weight that is hard to shake.
Pain isn’t pleasant, but God knows it isn’t pointless. It shapes, it deepens, and it prepares us for a joy that outlasts the breathless, tears-streaming laughter we love but is all too fleeting.
A desire to be real. That’s what we all ache for, isn’t it? To be real. Not just in the theatrical sense, but in the Velveteen Rabbit longing-sense. In the Pinocchio craving-sense. We think we know these tales, but the real versions cut deeper than the storybook gloss. They are softened in memory, yet truly written with more ache than ease. Not made-up, not painted-on, not just wooden or plush. Real.
In every one of those enduring stories, becoming real means scars, mistakes, the cost of love, and the marks of time. It is no accident that our most beloved narratives weave whimsy and ache together until they are indistinguishable.
Scripture itself leans on memory. The Passover. “Remember the stones,” Joshua told Israel by the Jordan. “Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus told his friends at their last meal. Remembering keeps us tethered, not only to what was, but to what is true now.
The songs suggest that in September, memory comes easy; the grass is still green, the grain still yellow. But the song also heralds: December always comes. The snow will follow. And so will the call to remember.
“Deep in December, it’s nice to remember… and follow, follow.”
That lyric is not only nostalgic; it’s invitational. It’s not just remembering that matters; it’s following. It’s letting memory become movement. It’s letting what we know of love, loss, and faith take us forward into the seasons still to come.