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Stray memories pop out of my consciousness like gophers, poking up their heads, searching for relevance or possibly six more weeks of winter, and then disappearing back into their time vaults with old song lyrics and the entire cast of “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

These are fragments of recall that, to be fair, have a good chance of being false, or at least flawed. They keep popping up over the years, though, so I’m deciding there’s truth in those metaphorical rodents.

These little memory jolts are usually isolated sentences from books or lines from movies, often throw-away comments and...