"One Floor Below Me, You Don't Even Know Me, I Love You"
Updated: 3 days ago
There are certain things a twenty-one-year-old man remembers about a beautiful woman, even thirty-two years later. Green eyes. Red hair. Freckles scattered across her cheeks. Dimples that made it difficult to concentrate on whatever she was saying. Lavender fingernails nervously turning rings around her fingers. A smile that could make an otherwise ordinary Sunday afternoon feel considerably less ordinary. Apparently, the brain has its own ideas about which details are worth keeping close and which it quietly files away until something unexpectedly brings them rushing back. Driving home this week, a song did exactly that. Suddenly, I wasn't simply remembering a Sunday afternoon in Toledo. For a few extraordinary minutes, I was twenty-one again, sitting across from a beautiful redhead named Olivia.
And so was she.
September 10, 2026
Time travel is real.
I experienced it this afternoon somewhere between my last meeting of the day and home. There was no flash of light, no DeLorean accelerating toward 88 miles per hour, no flux capacitor, wormhole, or temporal anomaly. Christopher Lloyd did not suddenly appear to lecture me about disrupting the space-time continuum, and I did not disappear from the driver's seat of my car. The road in front of me remained exactly where it was. Traffic continued moving. The dashboard still told me it was 2026. But for a few extraordinary minutes, none of those things particularly mattered because I wasn't entirely there anymore. I was somewhere else, more than thirty years earlier, seeing a face and experiencing an afternoon I had not consciously revisited in decades.
I wouldn't say I had forgotten that afternoon. I couldn't. It was one of those moments in a life that somehow earns a permanent place in memory even though, at the time, there was no reason to believe it would. But life had piled thirty-two years on top of it. I hadn't told the story in years. I hadn't summoned the faces, reconstructed the conversations, or lingered over the tiny details. The memory was still there; I simply hadn't opened its door in a very long time. And apparently, it had been waiting.
The key was a song.
You remember insecurities you've long since outgrown, people whose faces you haven't consciously summoned in years, rooms that no longer exist, conversations you didn't know you'd retained, and tiny details your brain inexplicably decided were worth preserving. The present doesn't disappear, exactly. It simply becomes temporarily transparent, and through it you can see another life—the one you were living when that song first became yours.
It's Thursday, and ordinarily that means whatever has been rattling around in my head all week finally becomes a blog post. Today's subject was supposed to be the Do's and Don'ts of a Best Man's Speech, something I've been preparing for quite some time and fully intended to finish this morning. I had the topic, the stories, the lessons learned from nearly three decades of listening to Best Men alternately charm, embarrass, delight, horrify, and occasionally hold hostage entire rooms full of wedding guests. Then I drove home from my last meeting of the day, randomly selected a Spotify playlist I hadn't listened to in some time, and six songs later, the Best Man lost his speaking privileges for another week. Tony Orlando and Dawn had something else in mind.
“Knock Three Times.”
It isn't some forgotten song I hadn't heard since 1994. Quite the opposite. I've heard it countless times over the years, and whenever it comes on, I sing along. Always. I groove to it. I turn it up. There has always been something about that ridiculously cheerful little Tony Orlando and Dawn song that makes me happy almost immediately. If you had asked me yesterday why I liked it so much, I probably would have shrugged and told you it was catchy, nostalgic, fun—one of those songs that simply puts me in a good mood.
Apparently, the feeling had remained close to the surface even while the memory attached to it had been resting somewhere much deeper.
Then, driving home today, six songs into that Spotify playlist, something changed. Maybe it was the particular mood I was in. Maybe I was listening more closely than usual. Maybe memory simply decided that thirty-two years was long enough. Whatever the reason, the song suddenly opened a door I hadn't walked through in decades. And what surprised me wasn't simply that I remembered what had happened. I remembered everything. Within seconds, details I hadn't consciously summoned in years surfaced with startling clarity: a crowded bar on a Sunday afternoon, a Cleveland Browns game playing on televisions around the room, a server's tray, an impossibly pretty college student, and twenty-one-year-old me sitting at a Hooters in Toledo, Ohio.
There is a little context necessary before I take you there, because the person sitting at that bar in 1994 was a very different version of the man writing this today. I was never shy. Anyone who has known me for more than about seven minutes would probably laugh at the suggestion. I was an extrovert, a talker, a jokester, and someone who could strike up a conversation with virtually anyone. I made friends easily. I had a close group of friends in college, and I was surrounded by people much of the time. I worked in radio. I could entertain a room. I could make people laugh, and when all else failed, I was perfectly willing to make myself the punchline. Social confidence was never particularly difficult for me.
Confidence with women was another matter entirely. I had one girlfriend in high school and spent all four years of college single. Within my group of friends, I became extraordinarily familiar with life as the third wheel. Sometimes I was the fifth wheel. On particularly successful nights for everyone except me, I could achieve the almost mathematically impressive status of seventh wheel. There is a peculiar kind of loneliness in being surrounded by people you genuinely love while simultaneously feeling as though everyone else has been handed the instructions to a part of life you somehow missed. I wasn't sitting alone in my dorm room every weekend. Quite the opposite. I was out. I was social. I was laughing. I was making other people laugh. And yet there were plenty of nights when I went home feeling profoundly alone.
Some of that was simply being young. Some of it was the way I saw myself. I have struggled with my weight for most of my life. I'm 5'6". I also began losing my hair extraordinarily young and was completely bald by twenty. There was at least one unexpected advantage to that: once the last of my hair disappeared, I don't believe I was ever carded for alcohol again. Apparently Mother Nature had issued me her own government-approved identification one year before the law allowed. Unfortunately, that wasn't much consolation when I looked around at the guys women seemed to notice.
I was never the guy women swooned over. I was not the type who could even make them turn their heads. I was the funny guy. I could make women laugh, and I liked being able to do that. Humor was comfortable territory. Humor was where I knew I belonged. Somewhere along the way, however, I had quietly convinced myself that making a woman laugh was probably the best I could hope for.
That is the twenty-one-year-old who walked into a Hooters in Toledo that Sunday afternoon.
During my final two years at Bowling Green State University, I taught religious school at Temple B'nai Israel, a Conservative synagogue in nearby Sylvania, Ohio on Sunday mornings. On one of these commutes, I stopped at the Toledo Hooters before heading back to campus. It had been an unusually long week. I no longer recall why, but I was feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and heavy-hearted that day. I figured I’d eat some wings, drink a beer or two, and watch the Browns game. This was the 1994 season, before Modell moved the team to Baltimore. The Browns would finish the year with the NFL's top-ranked scoring defense under Bill Belichick, and for one of the last times in my life, watching them actually seemed like a reasonable way to brighten my mood.
There was nothing significant about the decision to stop. That's worth remembering because so many of the moments that stay with us begin that way. We don't hear a musical score swelling in the background to warn us that we're about to make a memory. I wasn't meeting anyone there. Nobody was expecting me. I was simply a college kid killing a Sunday afternoon between teaching religious school and returning to Bowling Green, hoping wings, beer, and the Cleveland Browns could distract me from whatever had been weighing on me that week. Had the restaurant been slightly less convenient, had I decided I wasn't hungry, had there been an open table somewhere else, this particular memory would not exist.
It was a Sunday afternoon during football season, so the restaurant was crazy busy. I had no patience to wait for a table (and I was there alone), so I opted to sit at a vacant seat at the bar.
Then she walked over.
I don't remember what I expected when I took that empty seat at the bar, but I certainly wasn't prepared for her. She flashed a stunning smile as she approached me, somehow seeming to read my mood before I had said much of anything and, almost immediately, appearing determined to change it. To my twenty-one-year-old eyes, she was impossibly beautiful. She was a redhead, too, which put me at an immediate disadvantage. (I had developed a hopeless weakness for redheads somewhere around 1988, when Jessica Rabbit first graced movie screens and permanently recalibrated the adolescent portion of my brain.) She was funny, quick-witted, effortlessly kind, and possessed the sort of infectious energy that made everyone around her feel happier simply because she had walked into the room. At the time, I remember thinking I had never met anyone so effervescent—and, of course, she was a Hooters girl. She held me mesmerized.
Her name was Olivia, and I soon learned that she was a Cleveland native attending school at the University of Toledo. There was, of course, an obvious explanation for some of her attention. She was a Hooters girl. Flirting came with the territory, and a good tip was always worthwhile. I understood that much even at twenty-one. But I knew then—and I remember now—that there was something more happening across that bar. At one point, her manager actually scolded her for neglecting the other patrons because she had spent so much time talking to me. Olivia dutifully hurried away, filled drafts, delivered drinks, checked on everyone she had apparently forgotten existed, and then returned to me for another lengthy conversation. Before long, the cycle repeated itself. She would disappear long enough to do her job and then somehow find her way back to the same spot across from me.
Looking back, the signs weren't particularly subtle. She played with her hair while we talked. Her hand grazed mine. She bit her lip while listening to me. She leaned closer than conversation across a noisy bar strictly required. She teased me constantly, laughed at things I said that probably weren't nearly as funny as her reaction suggested, and maintained the kind of eye contact that should have made the situation obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of flirtation. Awkward Alan, naturally, picked up on none of it. I read women about as well as I read A Tale of Two Cities—a novel I have begun six times but have never managed to finish. In my defense, the possibility that a woman who looked like Olivia might actually be flirting with me seemed considerably less plausible at twenty-one than the possibility that she was simply exceptionally committed to customer service.
At first, the conversation leaned on Cleveland sports—she was a loyal Browns fan—but soon covered a variety of unexpected topics. I have no idea how we broached the topic, but I remember we were discussing Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining when she excused herself, telling me she had to get ready to dance. I must have given a very confused look because she stifled a giggle as she climbed on top of the bar. I watched her bend over to pick up a server’s tray, and, again, she giggled, giving me a wink as the music began.
She wasn’t alone. Every Hooters girl in the restaurant began dancing to “Knock Three Times” by Tony Orlando and Dawn. I remember being thoroughly amused by the choice. “Knock Three Times” is a lot of things, but a party anthem is not one of them. This was Hooters, after all, and a restaurant full of young women had just climbed onto bars and tables to dance. I suppose I expected something with a little more swagger, something designed to raise the temperature in the room. Instead, we got Tony Orlando and Dawn singing a ridiculously cheerful, wonderfully wholesome early-'70s pop song about communicating with the woman who lives one floor below. And somehow, improbably, it worked. It was one of the most enchanting moments I had ever experienced. Each held a server’s tray as a prop as they danced, which I found odd, until—
KNOCK
KNOCK
KNOCK
—they smacked the trays LOUDLY on the nearest flat surface in time to the three knocks of the song.
Understandably, every man in the restaurant had lost all interest in football.
I certainly had.
"Knock Three Times" was a "banger" of another sort.
There is something wonderfully absurd about the details our memories choose to keep. I couldn't tell you the final score of the Browns game. I couldn't tell you exactly what I ate or how many beers I drank. I couldn't reconstruct most of the conversation Olivia and I had that afternoon if my life depended upon it. Yet I can still picture those trays. I can remember the surprise of that first synchronized crash. I remember watching the entire restaurant's attention shift at once. Most of all, I remember Olivia looking at me. Thirty-two years later, that's what remained buried somewhere beneath everything that happened afterward.
When the song came to its end, she climbed down from the bar and again stood across from me smiling. She leaned over the bar, resting her chin on folded hands, her elbows bent on the bartop close to mine. I was ecstatic to continue our conversation, but Stanley Kubrick no longer interested me. “There ought to be a safety warning for how fast you just made every man’s jaw drop,” I joked. She blushed adorably, and said, “Did they? I was only watching yours,” and I blushed as well. She confessed, red-faced, that she loved the song.
From that moment on, I’ve loved the song, too.
And we kept talking. Olivia continued making her rounds behind the bar, occasionally disappearing to refill drafts or take care of the customers her manager had already reminded her she was supposed to be serving, but she always came back. The conversation wandered everywhere and nowhere, the way conversations sometimes do when two people discover that they simply enjoy talking to one another. There was no effort required to keep it going. One subject somehow became another, one joke led to the next, and neither of us seemed particularly interested in allowing the conversation to end. I had walked into Hooters intending to eat some wings, have a beer or two, watch the Browns, and head back to Bowling Green. Somewhere along the way, I stopped paying much attention to the televisions.
In fact, I stopped paying much attention to the time. The Browns game ended. Then another hour passed. And another. By the time I finally realized I should probably return to campus, I had been sitting at that bar for nearly six hours. The Sunday afternoon sunshine I'd walked in from had disappeared, and through the windows I could see that Toledo had gone dark. Whatever had seemed so overwhelming and heavy-hearted when I'd arrived now felt strangely distant. I had come in hoping football and a couple of beers might distract me for an afternoon. Instead, I had spent most of the day talking with a beautiful redhead who, for reasons I still didn't entirely understand, seemed every bit as reluctant for the conversation to end as I was.
Eventually, though, I couldn't occupy that barstool forever. Before leaving, I asked her one more question.
“Do you work every Sunday?”
Olivia smiled and nodded.
“I’ll have to come back,” I said.
Her smile widened.
“You better.”
There are moments in our lives whose importance announces itself immediately. Graduations. Weddings. Births. Deaths. First days and last days. We recognize those moments as milestones while we are living them, and we make a deliberate effort to preserve them. Then there are the other moments—the ones that arrive without ceremony and whose importance we don't recognize until much later. Nobody takes a photograph. Nobody writes down the date. We don't understand that anything important has happened because, by every reasonable definition, nothing has. We simply continue with our lives, unaware that something about who we are has already begun to change.
I walked into that restaurant carrying the accumulated insecurities of a twenty-one-year-old who had spent years assuming he understood how women saw him. I had become comfortable being the funny friend. The extra wheel. The guy who could make everyone laugh while his friends paired off around him. I had constructed a fairly durable image of myself, and because I saw evidence for it everywhere I looked, I had stopped questioning whether the image was accurate.
Then Olivia unexpectedly held up a different mirror.
I don't want to overstate what happened. This wasn't some cinematic transformation in which I emerged from Hooters, threw open the doors, and suddenly became George Clooney. I was still 5'6". I was still bald. I still struggled with my weight. I was still me. But something had shifted. Olivia had spent nearly six hours making it very clear that she enjoyed talking to me. She had made me feel interesting. She had made me feel noticed. She had made me feel attractive in a way I don't think I had ever really allowed myself to feel before. And when she looked across that bar and told me she had been watching my jaw drop, she gave a twenty-one-year-old kid something he hadn't walked into the restaurant possessing.
For perhaps the first time, it occurred to me that the way I saw myself might not be the way everyone else saw me.
That realization stayed, and so did the memory of that Sunday afternoon. Some days quietly earn a permanent place in the story of our lives even when we don't fully understand their significance while we're living them. I will never forget the day Olivia and I met, even though more than thirty years had passed since I'd really wandered back through it. Remembering a day and suddenly finding yourself back inside it are very different things.
Life piled on top of that afternoon, as life does. College ended. Careers began. Relationships happened. I became a teacher. I became a husband and father. I built a DJ business. Thirty-two years accumulated between that young man and the one driving home today. I knew that afternoon was back there somewhere. But I hadn't visited that particular memory in years.
That may be the strangest part of all. For more than thirty years, “Knock Three Times” continued to make me happy. I sang along. I grooved. I turned it up. I knew the song was connected to that afternoon; that connection was never lost. But somewhere along the way, the connection became less specific. The song retained the warmth of the memory without requiring me to unpack everything inside it. It could make me smile without making me consciously revisit why. Apparently, music doesn't need us to examine a memory in order to preserve what that memory once made us feel.
Then today, something was different.
I wasn't remembering the afternoon in the ordinary sense. This wasn't simply, Oh, yes, I remember when that happened. I already remembered that it happened. This was something far more visceral. The memory hit HARD. Toledo. Hooters. The Browns. The bar. The trays. The Shining. Her smile. Her red hair. Her green eyes. The freckles across her cheeks. The dimples I had apparently spent far too much time studying. Lavender fingernails turning three rings around her fingers. The bracelet she played with when our eyes had met for just a little too long. Learning her name. Olivia. Even the emotional architecture of the person I had been came rushing back with it: the loneliness, the insecurity, the heaviness I had carried into the restaurant, and the completely different way I felt when I eventually walked out into the darkness six hours later, suddenly convinced that wings on Sunday ought to become a weekly tradition.
Thirty-two years collapsed into a three-minute pop song.
That is time travel.
I spend an enormous portion of my life around music, which probably makes it easy for me to forget how mysterious this phenomenon really is. I think about music professionally now. I think about BPM, pacing, requests, transitions, generations, dance floors, energy, and the rhythm of a room. I think about what song should come next and what effect it will have when it does. Yet none of that explains what happened to me in the car today. I wasn't analyzing “Knock Three Times.” I wasn't thinking about whether it would work at a wedding. I wasn't trying to remember 1994. I wasn't trying to revisit Olivia.
The song found me.
Music does that. It hides pieces of our lives inside itself—not necessarily because we've forgotten them, but because no human being can carry every moment of a lifetime at the front of the mind. We spend our lives moving forward because we have no other choice. Places disappear. People disappear. Buildings are demolished. Restaurants close. Faces change. We change. Memories remain, but they settle into their places behind us while we continue accumulating new ones. The person I was at twenty-one is inaccessible to me in almost every meaningful physical sense. I can't visit him. I can't sit beside him at that bar. I can't tell him what his life will eventually become.
But apparently Tony Orlando can.
And that realization has particular resonance for me because of what I do for a living. Every weekend, I play music while other people are busy living moments they know they will remember forever. I play the song while a father dances with his daughter on her wedding day. I play the song while newlyweds hold one another for their first dance. I play songs that pull grandparents onto dance floors, reunite college friends, make siblings scream lyrics at one another, and cause people who haven't danced in twenty years to suddenly decide that tonight they will. Those are the obvious memories. We deliberately attach songs to them.
But I wonder about the ones nobody notices.
Maybe somewhere during one of my weddings, I play an ordinary song at an ordinary moment and somebody laughs with a person they love. Maybe a bridesmaid looks across the dance floor and catches someone's eye. Maybe a grandfather does something ridiculous. Maybe two friends who haven't seen each other in years throw their arms around one another. Maybe somebody is standing at the bar having a conversation that seems utterly inconsequential at the time. Nobody takes a picture. Nobody understands that this is one of the moments that will survive.
Then thirty years pass.
The song plays.
And suddenly the room comes back.
Maybe that's what a song becomes once a memory attaches itself to it: a door we carry through life. We know the door is there. We may even know what's on the other side. But most days we have no reason to open it. Life keeps us moving down the hallway. Years pass. Decades pass. We hear the song hundreds of times, and perhaps we smile because some warmth still escapes from whatever we've left behind it.
Until one day, something knocks.
Today, Tony Orlando and Dawn knocked three times.
And for reasons I will probably never understand, I opened the door.
On the other side was a crowded bar in Toledo. There were the Browns playing on television. There were server's trays crashing against tables and bartops. There was twenty-one-year-old me, carrying insecurities that fifty-three-year-old me had almost forgotten how heavy they once felt. And there was Olivia, red hair framing her face, green eyes looking into mine before dropping toward lavender fingernails fidgeting with the rings on her fingers, then lifting again as that dimpled smile returned, as though the intervening thirty-two years had never happened at all.
That may be music's greatest magic. Songs don't merely accompany our lives. They become containers for them. They carry versions of us forward long after we've stopped regularly visiting the people we were when we first heard them. Somewhere inside a three-minute recording can live a first kiss, a terrible breakup, a road trip, a college apartment, a parent who is no longer here, a friend whose voice we haven't heard in years, or an ordinary Sunday afternoon that quietly changed the way a young man saw himself. We don't have to forget those things for music to return them to us. Sometimes it simply reminds us how much more there was to the memory than the story we've reduced it to over the years.
We don't get to choose which moments music keeps. Sometimes music chooses for us. Today, Tony Orlando and Dawn didn't give me back a memory I had lost. They did something stranger.
They gave me back the afternoon.
And for a little while on the drive home, I wasn't a fifty-three-year-old wedding DJ thinking about the blog post he still needed to write that night. I was twenty-one years old again, sitting alone at a crowded bar in Toledo, watching the Cleveland Browns on television and talking about Stanley Kubrick with a beautiful redhead named Olivia.
Then she told me she had to get ready to dance.
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