R&T readers, I know you will forgive this trifling truffle of a post, but come on, we can’t be haggling out the hard theological issues every single post. As you will have already guessed, this opening feint is my attempt to de-stage the important place I secretly think this topic deserves, as so many disowned parts of everyday life and our everyday selves testify in their drowned clamor.

Here is my topic: what can happen in the supermarket. Occasioned by a few minutes of a recent afternoon with my five year-old daughter at a local chain, while we were looking at breakfast cereal, that’s when I heard it: that familiar English permanently middle-aged earnest and so Britishly pleasurable strain, the kind of voice that first partakes of tea and cakes and then overturns the cart in pique and passion before apologizing for doing so and then cleaning up the mess, concluding with “Fuck, yeah!” I’m talking, of course, about Phil Collins. All it took was the familiar invocation, played at a gentle volume from just beyond the paper towels, of three words: “Tonight, tonight, tonight.”

On hearing them, I was immediately placed somewhere around 1988, and will it make any sense if I tell you that between the single step that took me from the Honey Nut Cheerios to the Froot Loops, I had already traveled forth and back 23 years and felt what was in common and what was different in hearing those three words, now and then, now as then, then as now? So I sang the song to my daughter as we walked, and while she mischievously pulled things from the shelves to throw into our cart, I implored her, assisted by Phil Collins, “We’re gonna make it right!”

And because life is so overly connected at these deep levels, I then remembered, singing it to her, the place of this song in a time in my life when with other music it helped stitch together a way of keeping life together. And here I must be necessarily discreet, but have you ever had the experience of songs or fragments of songs that come to stand in for a time, either in the moment or in hindsight? A passage of lyrics from this tune once did that for me, and so here I was

in the grocery store, with Phil Collins singing too excruciatingly softly, and me hearing these same words in this instantaneous temporal traversal, and I realized that what I thought they meant then was nothing, nothing at all like what I now see they really meant for me.

Because to be placed thusly in the supermarket was to have the theological experience that the self that I thought I knew did not really know itself, an experience of, through music, revisiting that younger self with a deeper attention, and, through music, having that deeper attention itself transvalued by what these lyrics might mean to me 23 years from now. It was to have some taste of a trusted, infinite outside within time.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

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