It is weird how the human brain is wired. Certain songs can transport me right back to a specific moment in my life, like when I hear The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Suddenly it's eight o'clock on a Monday morning in 1962, and I freak out because I haven't done my homework for Mrs. Meade's math class.
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| Grandma and Me |
The same way that music
triggers memories, odors also can bring back a certain time and place. Sometimes even what was an unpleasant odor at the time is now a somewhat
pleasant time in my life. I remember a certain Chicago man that I knew back in
the early seventies who did not have the best of personal hygiene. At the time
it made me gag. Now, when I come across somebody who has the faint smell of an
old goat, I get a good feeling. They say that smells are routed through
the olfactory bulb in your brain, and that they pass very close to the region of the
brain that handles memory and emotion. Yesterday I walked into our bedroom and
a very familiar scent filled my nostrils. It was a scent that I have not
encountered in over sixty years. I don't know where it was coming from or what
caused it, but it brought me right back to my early childhood. It was the scent
of old woman breasts, drenched in cheap cologne and sweat. Standing there in
the bedroom I suddenly was two years old, on my grandmothers lap, staring down
into the cleavage of her bosom at the dainty flowered hanky that she stored
down there. It almost makes me not want to clean that room. It would be like
losing Grandma again.
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