When I’m 64: Intimate Essays of Musical Memories for My Adult Children. 6. Adele’s 25.

“Hello, it’s me” is how this album begins. It’s also how the Todd Rundgren song of that title starts. But Adele is not merely repeating a common sentiment or making a musical allusion. Nor is she plagiarizing. One listen to this record, start to finish, convinced me that it was the best break up album I’d ever heard. Not only are the lyrics full of longing, regret, and uncertainty, but her voice, her driving yet delicate delivery, drip remorse, sonic sorrow at the thought that she made a mistake in ending the relationship that dominates each song.

All of you know the longing of lost romantic relationships. You know, also, I think, that there is life after lost love. I wasn’t so sure. I thought that there might be life after death, but the resurrection seemed to take forever. But I wasn’t looking. I knew I needed to heal.

At the time, and for a year or so after, I wasn’t sure there was going to be love after love. I had female friends, but they had hurts of their own. Three of them knew Bridget, so there was an added weight, a hesitancy, a hurdle, a mountain of awkwardness that no one could climb. Or even wanted to.

I wasn’t looking. I wasn’t looking when I met your mother, and I wasn’t looking when I met the woman I dated before her. Academically bright but romantically reticent, restrained, untrained, her lack of living and loving was circular, creating a monster of fear that she then fed herself to. The monster made her want to be, as she said, the only person in the history of the world to live life without experiencing “emotional extremes.”

Pain, in other words.

I’d already battled this monster, beaten it badly, so this desire of hers was, for me, decidedly, a deal breaker. We might have had another date or two afterwards, but they were dead because it was dead, killed by my insight that her immaturity, her inability to grow, was probably permanent.

I was wrong. She eventually matured. 25 was released in 2015, about the time I — we — ran into her at a Tim Horton’s. Our encounter was brief, but not so short that it couldn’t include every theme on the album. Metaphorically. Yearning for youth, nostalgia for what neither of us would ever be again, melancholia for missed opportunity, and more than a passing regret for romance unrequited.

I want to say that I felt vindicated, a mix between “I was right,” and “I knew you’d miss me and eventually realize your mistake.” And maybe I did feel those things. A bit. But mostly I felt embarrassed. Embarrassed for her and that she was living in the past. Embarrassed for me that I was ever attracted to her. Embarrassed that we were in a public place having such a personal and private conversation. Embarrassed that one of you was with me, not because you were you or that I was steering the conversation away from you, hiding it from you, hiding you from it, but because you had to see it, learn its contents, in real time. In the flesh. Literally.

That you have no memory of this is a testament to my driving ability, me steering you from her and her from you, braking when I had to, accelerating us out of it and Tim’s before she was done.

I often told you all that I never stopped believing my life would be sweet again, that your mom would come into it and she would bring you. Between the lines, I also told myself I would meet someone who would appreciate my many fine qualities and tolerate the few that are not so endearing. Fortunately, yo momma tolerates the not so endearing epics that effortlessly endure and appreciates the few that stubbornly remain.

When I listen to 25, I hear Adele, of course, but I also hear your mom, the one who took a chance on me. The one who could have left but didn’t. The one who remained and remains.

The one who says hello.

On repeat.