Saudade, thanks to Duran Duran

I find the human brain a wondrous and strange organ. All those folds (named the gyri and sulci — there’s your Jeopardy question for the day) gray matter, white matter, neurons, dopamine, serotonin; all that makes us who we are, encased in a skull that isn’t, but should be, made of titanium. Makes you wonder how we’ve survived as a species.

A very strange thing about our brains, tucked away somewhere in all those gyri and sulci, (see? real world application of your Jeopardy knowledge) is how certain elements of our lives like sounds and smells can evoke a string of memories or emotions. You may be taken back to your childhood by the distinctive scent of Coppertone as it reminds you of summers spent with your family; the sound of traffic and honking horns will always put you in your first apartment in the city, or the taste of coriander and lemongrass will forever transport you to that trip to Thailand you took as a newlywed. For me it’s cooking spaghetti, specifically the smell of the salty water mingling with the noodles and the act of stirring the pot. I will always remember my 7th grade home economics teacher getting so mad at me as I pulled a spaghetti noodle from the boiling pot and ate it, as a test for doneness. Let’s just say she thought my methods were too hands-on.

But there’s a word in Portuguese, saudade, that explains those kinds of memories with a passion and intensity not found in our own language. It’s a great word—a fantastic word—with many subtle meanings; a longing, nostalgia or yearning and “a longing for something or some event that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future.”

I experienced saudade, thanks to Duran Duran.

Earlier this week, I got a startling jolt to my memory that I haven’t been able to put out of my mind. A song came on the radio as I drove with my youngest son, the two of us cruising down the coast here on yet another glorious summer day. It was Hungry Like The Wolf, and it is popular, again, with both my sons’ age groups. I know, I too am amazed because 32 years later, they’re singing along with Duran Duran — we’re singing Duran Duran together.

I think the reason my mind made the past come to the forefront so vividly at that moment was due to a combination of me being deliriously happy as I was together with my son, singing the words out loud through the open windows, the feel of the summer sun, the look of the sky all while being in a car watching the coast unfold before us. It took that specific merging of all those elements to make my neurons fire and conjure up the past the way it did.

I was immediately taken back to the Maryland of my past, sitting in the back of my friend’s car as we drove along, the four of us probably headed to Washington, D.C. on a hot, sticky summer day in 1982. Maybe it was even close to my 20th birthday. I don’t remember, but I remember the song and the sense that I was almost touching complete happiness or at least, the promise of happiness was there, laid out before me. It was not a particularly joyous time in my life so I have no idea, now, why I was feeling that way. It could have been I was just thrilled to be away from the oppression of my home and my insane mother, who should have been medicated but wasn’t. Maybe I had just gotten rid of an idiot boyfriend who had been causing me pain. It may have been I saw a glimpse of the future that day and the future was still playing Duran Duran—one with me, my husband and our two gorgeous sons singing Rio all together.

Whatever was going through my almost 20 year old mind is lost now, but not that sensation of realizing happiness that I’ve come to associate with that song.

I did look over to my son as the song ended, beaming, and told him it’s amazing to me that here I am singing a 32 year old song with him as we drive along the California coast. He got it, he understood my sense of complete contentment at that moment because he had fun too. We had made happy fools of ourselves singing with the windows down and two cute girls in the next car smiled at him. In the good way.

And had you come to me then and said to my almost 20 year old self, “Margaret, you’ll be very content one day, driving along with one of your two beautiful sons and guess what? Duran Duran’s Hungry Like The Wolf will come on the radio and the two of you will sing it together — word-for-word, and all will be right with the world,” I would have said you are insane for many reasons, but mostly because I never thought I could be so perfectly happy.

Saudade.