Ten years ago I was living in a town called Schwenksville about an hour outside of Philadelphia. How do you end up in Schwenksville? A series of bad decisions, usually. The story was no different for me and Shuffy. We’d landed in what I can only describe as a bunker cut into the side of a hill behind a falling down early nineteenth century farmhouse. The area, ten years ago, was still semi-rural. Semi. The rest of it had been completely suburbanized and served mostly as a bedroom community for people working in Philly. It was a place that felt like a place that once felt like a place.

Updike wrote about that part of Pennsylvania. He grew up there. His greatest character, Rabbit, was the product of that world when it was still more or less a world. By the time we got there Updike was long gone and, well, dead actually.

One day Shuffy and I were having especially bad luck. Things hadn’t been working out for us for quite a while and then we received some even more terrible news about our already dismal situation. Shuffy put on a record and held her hands out to me in the universal gesture that says, “hey, let’s dance.” I was annoyed. But something in her facial expression and the song playing changed my mood. We danced together in a tiny room with a very low ceiling in a bunker cut into the side of a hill in semi-rural Pennsylvania.

You’re curious about the record? It was Pussy Cats by Harry Nilsson. I know. But that was the record that happened to be on the top of the pile. And so we danced around to that. It didn’t really matter what was playing. But then again, in these sorts of situations, it always matters. Because the universe. Because God. Because unseen forces that make things one way versus another.

The song “Don’t Forget Me” came on. I want to say a thing or two about that song. But first a detour. Because hearing that song reminded Shuffy that Marianne Faithfull did a cover of it after Nilsson died in 1994. This was Faithfull’s tribute to Nilsson and a promise to him that she would, indeed, not forget him. By the mid 1990s, Faithfull’s voice had cratered out from drugs and cigarettes and all the hard living since 1964. Her voice was gravel and sandpaper and dying cats. It had become the voice it always needed to be.

Hearing Marianne Faithfull sing “Don’t Forget Me” you realize that it could have been written by Kurt Weill and sung by Lotte Lenya. It’s an unknown B-Side from the Threepenny Opera. It’s a burnt out torch song from the last days of the Weimar Republic. Faithfull pronounces some of the lines, “Let me know you think about me too,” with a Deutsch-inflected lilt that sounds like maybe Lenya is singing them, or Marlene Dietrich. Faithfull knew what she was doing. She knew the ghosts she was summoning.

I was not at all surprised when I learned that Lana Del Rey is a fan of “Don’t Forget Me” and that she especially loves a moment, deep into the song, where Nilsson’s voice cracks a bit as his singing turns into something more pleading. Begging. Don’t forget me. Please, please don’t forget me. The song is dominated by voice and piano. But there’s a string section in there. Someone put some strings in. It might actually have been John Lennon, who produced the whole album. Anyway, the strings come in and do their rising, which is what string sections are meant to do. And the piano chords go through the progression and the music swells and then Nilsson begs and pleads:

Don't forget me, don't forget me
Make it easy, only just for a little while
You know I'll think about you
Let me know you'll think about me too

It doesn’t even fully make sense, that second line in what is basically the chorus. “Make it easy, only just for a little while.” Before I looked the lyrics up I’d always thought he was singing, “make it easy on me just for a little while.” But the actual lyric is more abstract, less personal. Make it easy. Not always. Not forever. But just for a little while. Only just for a little while. Make it easy. Make the whole damn thing easy. But only just for a little while.

Only just for a little while Harry Nilsson was around and made some songs. Some of them were good. They had a sound and a feeling that wasn’t quite of their own time. His friend John Lennon was around then too, but he wouldn’t be for too much longer. Those days with me and Shuffy in Schwenksville were hard. They were the days of wilderness, the days of being lost in a story to which you’d forgotten the narrative. But ten years later, I realize also that they were great. They were just what they needed to be.

Marianne Faithfull, who would have believed it, outlived Nilsson and Lennon and plenty others too. She died in January. That seems to bring something about Nilsson’s song to full closure.

In the wintertime keep your feet warm
But keep your clothes on and don't forget me
Keep the memories
But keep your powder dry too

Only just for a little while I once danced with Shuffy in a sorry little bunker near a rural road in a forlorn place that long ago forgot what it was. Only just for a little while Harry Nilsson sang a song and then Marianne Faithfull sang it too. They asked something of us. Not to forget them. To let them know that we think about them too. Only just for a little while.

Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review and is a contributor at The New Yorker. He won the Whiting Award for non-fiction in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan’s selected essays can be found here. His books from Slant are The Drunken Silenus. and  The Fate of The Animals He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.