Who knows what triggers memories?
Is it possible that you start dumping old ones when the new ones crowd them out?
On the way to drop off the oglet at school, I thought of a girl I had not thought of in a very long time.
She was the first girl ever to be actively nice to me, though she was a holy terror to everyone else. I expect she tried even her own parent’s patience.
I don’t remember her name, but I remember she eventually ended up sitting very close to the door through grade school because someone was always coming in to have to mop up her pee. The girl could pee at the drop of a hat, and she always did so with an exquisite timing- I expect she knew the precise moment when it would most disrupt the class.
We never laughed at her for peeing, because the rest of us were occasionally a leaky bunch as well. The classrooms at Holy Name School were not the warmest, and the urge to cut loose was common. Again, all the pissers ended up close to the door so it was a matter of little effort to get the mop. Lacking phones, Danny, the class puker, would run down and get the janitor who would hake his head and show up with a mop.
Anyway, I ramble. This girl, who I will call Sophie because I cannot remember her name, was fond of terrorizing all the other boys, but not me. One day, long before she had been moved to Pee Chair #1, she was sitting across from me and I saw her pulling a large rubber band out of her pocket. She proceeded to coat the rubber band with boogers and snot, harvested from a nose that never seemed to stop running. I did not understand. She demonstrated by stretching the rubber band to it’s limits and shooting it right at the back of Randy Bernhardts head, where he ended up with his hair full of congealed snot for the rest of the day.
Later she grew into a blonde beauty with a gap between her front teeth, who wore loose blouses and tight jeans, and all the boys were after her but she still only had eyes for me. In my epic obliviousness to the advances of women I took no notice, and she married a preacher from Omaha and had nine squalling brats, turning that tiny waist and flat stomach into a wasteland of moonpies and stretchmarks.
I do not know why that surfaced today, I really don’t. But there it is.
Wow. You not only remember the girl you knew what happened to her.
I have no idea what happened to any of the first ones I knew.
Course my wife demands I pay attention to her and no one else, so I don’t lose much sleep over it.
Yeah, strange triggers… Who knows…
Mine are sensory. Odors. Frex, I smell dry fallen leaves and, instantly, I’m back in Omaha in the early ’60s, walking home from school through an Ozzie and Harriett suburbia.
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I got to stay in my uncle’s room when I visited my grandma and grandpa. He was killed in Viet Nam in ’68. It had a distinct dusty musty smell. My bedroom smells like that sometimes.
Times I wake up and expect to smell buckwheat flapjacks cooking and coffee in the percolator. Get a huge lump in my throat when I realise I’m 51, grandma, grandpa, mom and dad are gone, and I’m the grandpa now. What the heck, brain….
I’ll have to tell you about the girl back in school who had the most annoying crush on me. After high school we lost touch, till recently. She’s a year younger than me and a stone fox stunner. Did not see that coming…
There is a certain scent of perfume…I don’t know the name of it … but my Dad’s mom used to wear it. She was liberally scented with it while she was laying at rest…during the family’s final viewing. I was 13 at the time, first funeral ever attended.
Every time since, that this particular scent passes my way (and there are a few little old ladies at the store who use it), all I see is Grandma. A constant reminder of ones mortality.