Have you ever had a day when something keeps coming into your head? Today was one of those days. All day long, memories kept popping into my head due to a sound, a sight, a smell, some sense. Not only did the memories the memories keep popping up but the term sense memories followed. I kept thinking about how powerful the brain is that a simple word or smell can conjure up such strong feelings. The brain is an amazing organ. At the end of the day, one of the strongest ones popped.
As an actor, I used memories all the time. A song, a smell and I could bring up any emotion needed. I used to use it when I wanted to freak my students out in the classroom. I could bring forth a flood of feelings. However, one must be careful due to the strength of these memories. While many of them can bring elation, some can place in you a deep dark area that you thought you had left behind.
I love to walk into my kitchen when I am cooking spaghetti sauce. I start to think of my Nana and the fall. Add to the smell a cool autumns day with leaves crunching as I walk in from the car and I am now transported back to my home of long ago. Every fall my grandmother would have us working to run tomatoes through a juicer. She then put all of the ingredients for her homemade spaghetti sauce into roasters in our breezeway. For weeks, I would walk into the room after getting off the school bus to the aroma of simmering sauce. I went there today as I passed by somebody having something with sauce for lunch.
Oranges can have the opposite effect on me. I would like to say that the smell of oranges take me back to trips to Florida with the high school band. Unfortunately after those trips I had a different experience with oranges. I worked in a nursing home as a computer programmer. My office was in the basement away from all of the activities of the nursing home. If I wanted coffee or lunch, or I had to assist someone with a computer problem, I came up to the main floor. That is where the oranges come in. I think nursing homes do it differently now, but back in the 80s the facilities used an orange scented air freshener to cover up accidents. The spray did little to cover or remove the original odor. What it did do is mix the first odor with oranges. To this day, I cannot allow orange scented air freshener into my house.
Songs especially can bring up those memories. Like I already said, it is amazing how intense the memories can be. It is not just a thought or fleeting feeling. Depending on the song, I can feel as if I am no longer in the present. It is probably the closest thing to an out-of-body experience that I can get. The first few notes of Somewhere Over a Rainbow takes me to my dad’s memorial service. The drum and bugle corps played this in his honor at the service – his favorite song. All present day knowledge will stop and I am 15 again.
So this leads me to the biggest of the sense memories of the day – who knows maybe subconsciously it has been in the back of my head due to a news story that played but I did not focus on. All I know is that it just took a question from the talk show host, “Where were you thirty years ago tomorrow, January 28, 1986 at 8:38 in the morning?” Just those few words triggered a whole day’s worth of memories for me. At first something didn’t seem right. 8:38 in the morning? That was too early. The brain finally worked out the fact that 30 years ago I was 2600 miles away in the East coast. Once my brain reconfigured the time, the pictures started flooding in.
I was in college in Geneva, NY. My friend and I were in the fraternity house preparing for our chemistry lab. We were working on the pre-labs and drawing out the experiment. I can still picture the drawings – a closed system. We were going to be heating something up that day. One of our brothers came in with a weird expression on his face. He told us that we better come down and check out the TV. Normally we would have thrown something at him and told him to knock it off, but the look told us something serious had happened. We put down our work and headed to the basement where the television was kept. We no sooner hit the bottom step and we saw the replay on the screen. There in front of our eyes in slow motion, we watched the space shuttle explode. At least that was the conclusion since it was hard to tell what happened in all the smoke. The replay went again, this time continuing. Eventually the rockets went away and pieces started falling. We stood there in silence. No one in the room could understand it.
CNN eventually cut to pictures of the families in the stands watching it. They stood there in disbelief.
I can remember the fact that we had discussed going down to watch the launch. Both my friend and I had passed on it since we had seen so many of them in the past. It was one of those things that was cool to watch the first few times, but now it had come passé. While some people celebrated the fact that it was the first time a civilian was going up, in a way, we looked at it that had become so common place that anybody could go up. All that changed.
I started by talking about how powerful the brain is. I sat in my car thinking of all the actions and events of that day. I could feel the walls of the hall as we raced down the hall. I could sense my heart pounding from running down the stairs. I could hear the silence in the room when we entered. I could feel the sense of loss and pain for the families. I was no longer in 2016, but I had found that time machine and traveled back to 1986.
Again, something was nagging at me all day and memories kept popping. Perhaps it was just a prep for this final flow of memories. A day that I will recall forever. I will always know what I was doing and where I was on January 28, 1986.
So that is where my thoughts went today. Thank you for meandering with me.