I REMEMBER...dreams, sights, sounds, smells

....sights and sounds that conjure up people and places from the past. I was talking with my daughter Sarah (age 10) about memories and making this blog. She had this really cool observation. She said young people dream of things that will happen in the future and old people dream of things that happened in the past. I like it. That just about sums it up. We talked about memories and how the older you are the more memories you have and how certain sounds, songs and smells can trigger vivid remembrances of past people and experiences. Every time I hear Suzie Q by Creedence Clearwater Revival, I remember working at the Italian Cottage Restaurant in 1968. I was a junior in college, taking 21 units, trying to graduate on time after “not paying attention to my academics” for far too long and working nights. It was the hot song of the day and it played on the radio all the time.

There are smells that can transport me, like a time machine, back 55 years in an instant. When I was a kid, my mom used to take her makeup off using Noxzema skin crème and both my dad and my granddad used Old Spice after-shave lotion. I have a tub of Noxzema I use each morning to wash my face – wakes me up instantly and I go back to when I six years old and kissing my mom good night with her face covered in white crème. I use Old Spice after-shave on the weekends and I am spun back to when I was about seven years old, visiting my grandpa in Tishomingo, Oklahoma. He would let me shave with his double edge razor (with a cardboard blade), using a shaving mug with a big hairy brush to spread the lather on my face and then splash Old Spice on afterwards, as we got dressed for church on Sunday mornings. After church, we would often go on a picnic and fishing on Pennington Creek under the old swinging bridge (actually quite famous and probably the only thing that put Tishomingo on the map) after church while grandma worked on “supper’. It wasn’t dinner, it was supper. Lunch was dinner. That was probably a Midwest or Oklahoma thing. It certainly wasn’t used that way after we moved to California.

Song of the Day: Creedence Clearwater Revival - Suzie Q