My dog in the back seat, the scents like music to her nose during our night drives, Dion’s doo-wop, and a book I read over and over as a kid, Jenny Lind and Her Listening Cat, which had illustrations of a little girl just like me, a blue ribbon in her hair, and her beautiful gray cat, sitting with paws perfectly together. Jenny Lind would sing to Kisse Katt in their little Swedish house, quietly and modestly, not knowing that she would grow up to be the most famous woman in the world for a while. I loved that book; Jenny Lind’s otherworldly soprano unfurling in the cold Swedish air, the devotion of Kisse Katt, the two of them at night gazing out their attic window at the northern lights billowing in the sky.

Neil Young pulled a song from his own music bag that I sang along to when I was younger, about the aurora borealis and about indigenous people being shoved from their land and their tribal ways.

I saw the aurora borealis once, driving on a highway outside Ithaca with my friend Sara; the sky became animate, bright curtains floating and changing color, a gauzy hem lifting and settling, then lifting again. Sara reached over and turned off the music and we were silent, the road droning beneath us, until it was over.

“Do you know what that was?” she asked me in a hushed voice.

“I think so,” I said.

Pure sensory experience. Who knows what it meant for Sara, but for me it instantly retrieved the fifty-year-old memory of Jenny Lind, the cold window of her garret, the soft gray cat, the blue ribbon that shone like satin, a clear soprano voice made suddenly visible in the black sky, her vibrato moving the drapes of time and space and color and light.

Neil Young’s song wasn’t really about the aurora borealis; it was about indigenous people being shoved from their land and their tribal ways. My dad was known on the base for being an outdoorsman, a guy who got so excited at the miracle of salmon spawning, a guy who knew just where to be to watch the bears fishing, a guy who could lead the trackers as they searched for the forever-lost man. And so one morning someone woke him very, very early to say there were Inuit in a boat asking for Beard, and when he dressed and went out, they said they were there to take him to watch the annual seal harvest.

“Honey,” he told me, palms upturned. (It was always the same.) “It was an honor and I couldn’t say no.” So he went with them. Once I told him I was planning to see a documentary in which there was footage of baby seals being killed. He said, “Don’t watch that.” Uncharacteristic for him to say don’t anything. When I pressed him on it, he said only, “It’s very, very tough.” So I didn’t watch. But he had, all those years ago, 1940-something, and felt privileged to do so and then ill afterward.