When I heard last night that the singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg had died, I immediately had a powerful memory flash — not just a mere run-of-the-mill recollection that’s as two-dimensional as an old postcard, but one of those strange and rare experiences when it seems as if time and space become malleable and, for just one brief instant, you are someplace else, someplace you haven’t been in a very long time. In this case, I was 13 or 14 years old, riding in the top bunk of our old camper as the truck beneath it carved through the darkness. I don’t remember where we were going, or maybe it was where we’d been; Dad used to drive the truck-and-camper around town all the time, so it might not have been anywhere special. I can’t see anything beyond the front window except a cone of highway caught in the headlights. In my imagination, the white lines flashing past on the pavement are doppler-distorted stars seen from a starship clicking along at point-five past lightspeed. I’m reading a Clive Cussler paperback, and on my amazing little Sony Walkman — that was a type of portable music player in the pre-iPod days, kids — I’m listening to a cassette of Dan Fogelberg’s Greatest Hits.

Pretty incongruous, I know, to have been listening to a sensitive balladeer while reading the adventures of the misogynistic action hero Dirk Pitt, but was that really any more incongruous than a teenage boy listening to a balladeer period? My enjoyment of Fogelberg wasn’t something I advertised at that age, when being cool was very, very critical, and being cool consisted largely of not being overly sensitive. Nevertheless, I really liked the guy’s music. It was pretty. And he was a storyteller, and I’ve always been drawn to those. He was so good at telling stories, in fact, that even at the callow age of 14, I could relate perfectly to a song about running into an old lover at the grocery store despite never having had any kind of experience with lovers old or new. Years later, when something like that actually did happen to me, I wasn’t at all surprised to find myself thinking of “Same Old Lang Syne” afterwards. Not because my encounter was all that much like the specifics described in the song — it was outside a pizza place, for one thing, and the girl in question had her young son in the car — but because the emotions of the encounter had felt like the song.

Maybe that’s what I found appealing about Fogelberg: his songs, his stories, had the ring of truth. “Same Old Lang Syne,” “Leader of the Band,” “Longer,” “Run for the Roses” — they all seemed grown-up and real to me in a way that a lot of other music didn’t. I could detect the authenticity in them at an almost instinctive level. I learned a lot about what love was supposed to feel like by listening to Dan Fogelberg — love of a woman, of a father or mother, of music or whatever one’s own passion may be. Listening to those Greatest Hits again tonight as I type this, I still hear truth and maturity in his words. That’s something I aspire to with my own writing. I haven’t thought much about Fogelberg in a very long time, but I realize that I will miss him now he’s gone.

Dan Fogelberg was 56 years old, a victim of prostate cancer.

Incidentally, I always had the idea that Dirk Pitt liked Dan Fogelberg, too; I used to imagine Dirk carefully putting an LP on the phonograph at the end of a hard day before lowering the lights and pouring a glass of wine for the lovely lady waiting on his couch…