Just What I Needed

In a late spring afternoon in Daejeon, I found myself sitting inside Lotteria with a hamburger and fries, watching people drift in and out of the restaurant the way they do in every city in the world. Nothing about the moment seemed especially important.

And then "Just What I Needed" by The Cars came on Spotify.

The instant that familiar guitar riff started, something happened that becomes more common the older you get. Time stopped behaving properly.

Suddenly I wasn’t in Korea anymore. I was back in 1979, sitting in the snack bar at George Air Force Base out in the Mojave Desert. Somewhere beyond the base, Los Angeles radio stations pushed their signals across the dry California night air. Back then, songs didn’t arrive through algorithms or playlists. They appeared out of nowhere on the radio, attached forever to whatever moment you happened to be living when you first heard them.

And for a few seconds today, I could feel that old world again with surprising clarity. The fluorescent lights over the snack bar tables. The smell of grilled burgers and fryer grease. Young airmen talking loudly about cars, girlfriends, leave time, the future. The feeling that adulthood was still something just over the horizon instead of something already traveled through.

It’s strange what memory chooses to preserve. I cannot remember every conversation from those years. Entire months have probably disappeared. Faces have faded. Names sometimes arrive slowly now, as if traveling a great distance before reaching me. But a song? A song remains untouched. The first few notes of an old song can recover entire landscapes from inside us. You don’t simply remember the past. You briefly return to it.

That may be one of the hidden blessings of growing older. You begin to realize that your life never completely vanishes behind you. It continues to exist in fragments, quietly stored away inside ordinary things. Music. Certain smells. The sound of rain at night. A distant train whistle. Neon reflected on wet pavement. 

Sometimes those memories arrive gently. Sometimes they hit with almost physical force.

What surprised me today was not simply remembering George Air Force Base which is gone now. So much of that world has disappeared into time. But the song remains. And somehow, hearing it while eating a burger in Daejeon connected two versions of my life separated by nearly half a century. was realizing how alive that younger version of myself still felt somewhere inside me. 

For a moment, the years between then and now disappeared completely. Korea disappeared. The long passage of decades disappeared. I was simply there again—young, uncertain, restless, listening to a song on a radio station drifting in from Los Angeles.

And perhaps that is why nostalgia can feel both beautiful and painful at the same time. Because we are not only remembering places. We are remembering people we once were.

The older I get, the more I understand that life is not really divided into separate chapters the way we imagine. The young man sitting in that snack bar in 1979 and the older man sitting in Lotteria in Daejeon today are not strangers to each other. They are still connected by invisible threads—songs, memories, longings, mistakes, hopes, all woven together across time.

Music understands this better than we do. A three-minute song can carry fifty years inside it effortlessly.

And maybe that is part of why certain songs never leave us. They become more than music. They become emotional landmarks. Small portable pieces of our personal history that travel beside us wherever we go.

As I sat there today listening to Just What I Needed, I realized something else too. Back in 1979, I could never have imagined that one day I would be sitting in South Korea listening to the same song half a century later. I could not have imagined the roads my life would take, the people I would meet, the heartbreaks, the joys, the loneliness, the adventures, the years spent living here in the Land of Morning Calm.

Life rarely unfolds the way we expect. But every now and then, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, it quietly hands us a bridge between who we were and who we became.

And for a few brief moments, we get to walk across it.