It’s a legacy…of sorts

 I have the gift of an extremely associative memory. This is not the photographic memory that everyone talks about. That one has its own advantages. An associative memory is limitless. It is one that takes the visual, auditory, and olfactory and pegs something else to it as if it were an actual hyperlink to something unrelated.

For example, if I am driving westbound on Interstate 84 in New York State and approach the Port Jervis exit just before the Pennsylvania state line, a very detailed conversation that an old friend and I had over the cb radio decades ago rises to the surface. This is just one of a thousand examples.

My two boys have it too. About 10 years ago, my family and I were driving out to South Londonderry Vermont for a camping weekend. Chicago’s Saturday in the Park was playing on the radio. It reminded me how my friend Karen loved ice cream, and when the part of the song says, “Man selling ice cream…” she always sang that part of the song as kind of a queue meaning, “Now I want ice cream.” This conversation happened 100 feet west of the rail crossing in Chester Vermont on Route 11. TO THIS DAY, Liam will say just as we drive through this spot, “Dad, man selling ice cream.” Both boys demonstrate this unique system of memory pegs all of the time.

We often demonstrate it to each other, to show how acute it is. It is the reason why when in a conversation I can make an odd turn in the direction the conversation is going that probably will not make sense. A hazard of knowing me? I apologize to all the kindly folk who have endured this. You have to admit though, it keeps things interesting…maybe.

Associative memory is more than an anomaly it just happens to be a technique taught in Kevin Trudeau’s Mega Memory Course. I was very pleased to find this back in 1999. In this course, he teaches you to build what he calls a tree list and then when you need to remember something, you assign it to one of the memory pegs in the tree list. After a while, you develop the habit of automatically assigning everything to a peg and can remember anything. You basically create an event that has the memory peg and the item you want to remember. Doing so creates a mini-story that you cannot help but remember.

In all honesty, I have never been disciplined enough to make the habit stick. It’s ok though, I have my random, involuntary, never-know-when-it-is-going-to-strike version of associative memory. It is my legacy, or whatever you want to call it, it is mine.

Much more to an old comfort

 Day four of Covid. I have watched half seasons of TV shows just simply to make them go away. But the real comfort is found in what I always do when I am sick. I watch old episodes of M*A*S*H.   Watching each episode is like finding pieces of myself that I have not seen in 40 or 50 years. Like a large glass vase that shattered into hundreds of pieces. These pieces of me lay on a desolate floor that is untouched by the passage of time. The theme music, sounds, and visuals were such a peg in the contemporary consciousness of who we were in the 1970s and 1980s. I have an associative memory.  My memories of every moment of my life are stored secretly in the things I was seeing and the sounds that I was hearing.  This causes so many things to start coming back to me. The shards of my young self are in these pieces of glass, the sounds, the images, and my associative memory take me back in time to my grandmother's house.  I can hear her talking with my sisters in the kitchen.  I can smell the food she is cooking.  I see my dad‘s and my mom‘s young faces. I feel closer to my 15-year-old self than I have in years.  I know deep down that I am given a second chance at a memory that I have not had of Dad or Grandma in decades. Of all the gifts one can receive, this is priceless. I don’t really know what I am going to find but I know that I look forward to it.

 An interesting observation regarding M*A*S*H back in 2020. I recall a Facebook post about the show. So many people chimed in with very heartfelt sentimental memories. One person replied, “I have never watched it and I never will. I do not think war is funny!“ Of course, I bristled at this statement. He was putting M*A*S*H down for glorifying war or making fun of the suffering. Of course, M*A*S*H was the exact opposite of that, and it made its anti-war statement with such craft. So I responded that had he ever watched M*A*S*H he would know that it was actually the all-time anti-war show. They used its incredible popularity to show the absolute senselessness of war. How politicians and generals mastered sending young people away to die in war and that outcomes were measured in mathematical equations. It showed the innocence of those involved, a stark human view, stripped free of all the facade.  In a television show that lasted 3 times longer than the war it depicted, the creators of this masterpiece had the opportunity to take war apart with molecular honesty. The angle at which its story was told was beautiful as well. The story shifted to interesting perspectives in so many creative ways, but over all, it was told by a bunch of people who never asked for any of this and had placed before them a conveyor belt of young boys on the edge of death. What came next was the incredible sacrifice of everything that made up these doctors and nurses in an effort to not lose another one. I can recall instantly two episodes in which the war was infiltrating their dreams. I have no doubt this would happen to me if I were in the shoes of those doctors. I once got to see one of these units in Saudi Arabia. They are actually called CASH units (Combat Army Surgical Hospital). I delivered a truckload of supplies from Log Base Alpha. 

I’m glad I responded to the Facebook commenter this way because I received a reply from him that said “I did not realize this. I will have to give it a try sometime.

M*A*S*H gave us so much and I have a feeling that as far as my own personal memories are concerned, it has yet to give more.  But today, I want to just say thank you for the sick day comfort it provides.  M*A*S*H is like a warm familiar blanket.