On March 25, 2018, at 3:14 in the afternoon, I walked into Hi-Voltage Records in Tacoma and spent $24.27 on a brand new copy of Haley Heynderickx’s I Need to Start a Garden, which is the sort of completely ordinary transaction that would have disappeared from my memory forever if I hadn’t apparently spent the last twenty years leaving little electronic tripwires everywhere I went, because five minutes later Heidi got a notification from our Simple bank account and texted me, “I spy you buying that record 😏”

Then, because apparently even in 2018 I was incapable of simply entering a record store, buying the record I intended to buy, and leaving like a person with a functioning mission statement, I replied:

“I got distracted.”

This is how I ended up back here.

I had been looking at March 25 as part of this ongoing project where I pick random dates from my past and then go digging through whatever digital sediment still exists, tweets and emails and text messages and calendars and receipts and photos and whatever else I managed to accidentally preserve, and March 25 initially looked pretty empty until that Hi-Voltage receipt popped up, and suddenly I wanted to know why that particular record mattered enough that I bought the physical copy less than a month after it came out.

I remembered the broad outline immediately. I loved that album. It eventually became a family favorite. I remembered first hearing Haley Heynderickx on All Songs Considered, and I remembered the song that did it, “Oom Sha La La,” particularly the ridiculous, wonderful moment near the end when all of the uncertainty and anxiety that has been accumulating through the song suddenly erupts into this enormous declaration about the fact that she needs to start a garden.

She REALLY needs to start this garden.

That was what killed me.

I was into the song from the beginning, because Haley’s voice and the strange little shape of the song had already gotten me, but when she started building toward that shout I was completely hooked, because there is something extremely funny to me about hearing that much genuine existential angst funneled into a task that could also appear on a Saturday morning to-do list between “buy cat litter” and “clean out the refrigerator.”

I need to start a garden.

The plants have apparently become an emergency.

Somebody get this woman a shovel.

I remember sending it to Heidi right away.

At first, I thought I had heard the song when NPR published a piece about Haley in October 2017, because that was the oldest All Songs breadcrumb we could find, but that turned out to be a good example of why I’m doing this project in the first place, because memory had the right mechanism and the wrong timestamp.

I didn’t listen to All Songs Considered like a person following a television show, dutifully consuming each episode when it appeared. I would fall behind for weeks or months, then open the feed while I was doing something else and pick an episode, sometimes more or less at random, and spend the next hour discovering music.

And on January 10, 2018, the digital trail suddenly gets very specific.

At 4:16 that afternoon, “Oom Sha La La” entered my Apple Music library.

At 4:59, I texted Heidi:

“Also finding some good music from ASC”

That is a forty-three-minute gap between the song entering my music library and me telling Heidi that All Songs Considered was feeding me good music, which doesn’t prove which exact episode I was listening to, but it is about as close as my accidental personal surveillance apparatus is likely to get to recording the moment a song entered my life.

And then there is the rabbit trail underneath that rabbit trail, because what I was doing while listening to All Songs Considered that afternoon tells another part of the story I had mostly forgotten.

I was driving for UberEats.

Bootstrapper Studios, the video production company I had started years earlier, was moving slowly, work was inconsistent, soccer production came in waves, and I needed money, so beginning in at least March 2017 I had started driving around Tacoma delivering food to strangers, which was a very specifically Adam solution because I absolutely did not want to drive regular Uber and have strangers sitting in my car, but I was perfectly happy to let their pad thai ride shotgun.

The surviving texts from this period are full of waiting.

Waiting for a hit. Waiting outside a restaurant. Waiting for an order to be ready. Waiting to see whether another delivery would come through before giving up and going home.

On January 10, the day Haley entered my library, business was apparently terrible. I told Heidi it was “super dead.” I walked laps around a park waiting for an order because there wasn’t anything else to do, and at one point I told her, very plainly, “I really need the money.”

And somewhere inside that long, slow afternoon, while I was driving around Tacoma waiting for somebody to decide they wanted McDonald’s delivered to their house, I turned on All Songs Considered and heard Haley Heynderickx.

There is something about that setting that makes the song make even more sense to me now.

I was in one of those strange transitional stretches where I was technically still running my company, technically still doing professional video production, technically still working in sports, but also driving around town hoping my phone would make the little noise that meant somebody needed a hamburger transported three miles, because adulthood is frequently much less interested in your professional identity than it is in whether the mortgage clears.

UberEats became a kind of financial shock absorber during those years. When Bootstrapper or soccer work picked up, I could stop driving. When things slowed down, I turned the app back on. In February 2018 I actually texted Heidi that I hoped I would get more Rainiers streams because that would mean “no more UberEats until late fall/winter again,” which tells me exactly how I thought about it at the time. It wasn’t a new career. It filled the holes.

By early 2019, the Rainiers job would finally become the thing that replaced it.

But in January 2018, I was still waiting for the next order.

And Haley was yelling about a garden.

Two months later, on March 2, I Need to Start a Garden came out, although Apple Music shows that by then I was already well past the single. After adding “Oom Sha La La” on January 10, I started exploring her other songs almost immediately, and by the time the album arrived I was listening to the new tracks right away, including on Sonos at home, so this was already becoming shared household music before I ever held the record in my hands.

Then, on March 25, I walked into Hi-Voltage.

I don’t remember what I went there intending to do.

Maybe I intended to browse for ten minutes. Maybe I was looking for something completely different. Maybe “I got distracted” is the entire surviving historical record of my plan.

But there was I Need to Start a Garden, brand new, three weeks old, an album I was already listening to and already loved, so of course I bought it.

Five minutes later, Simple tattled.

“I spy you buying that record 😏”

There are much bigger artifacts in my archive than a $24.27 receipt. There are major life events documented in thousands of messages, whole relationships preserved in ridiculous detail, jobs beginning and ending, children being born, houses being bought, businesses struggling, marriages changing, and all the enormous things that you would expect to matter when you look backward across a life.

But I keep finding that these tiny chains are some of my favorites.

A slow UberEats shift.

An old podcast episode.

A song added to a library at 4:16 in the afternoon.

A text to Heidi forty-three minutes later about finding good music.

A woman becoming increasingly distressed about her apparent failure to plant vegetables.

A record store two months later.

A bank notification.

“I got distracted.”

And now, eight years later, I can almost see the whole little machine working again, this ordinary afternoon in Tacoma quietly dropping a song into my life that stayed there, eventually becoming a family favorite and following us much farther than I could possibly have known while I was sitting in a car waiting for somebody to order dinner.

I hope she got that garden started.