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.

About Memory Pegs: The Dukes

It started out on a winter night in January of 1979. The preview just before the show, the Dukes of Hazzard looked very gritty and dark.  I was at my Grandma's house on that night and there was sort of an air of, "should this be on?" Black and White TV and all.

It did not take long for this show to be the family fun Friday night, sort of a Brady Bunch caliber of a deep South show with complications. The antagonist, Boss Hogg, was just as persistent as any villan in the old 1966 Batman series. Mad Magazine aptly pointed out that the plot lines consisted of Boss and Roscoe planting moonshine in the General Lee for episodes 3,5,7,9,12,15,18,21,23 of any given season.

 First peg: That statement from Mad has defaulted my mind lifelong to the expected length of a television season, by which I mean, 23 episodes,  period. I also have to say there is an image in my head from that same magazine in which the Duke boys go to California. Even funnier they are united with Ponch and Jon from Chips (the motorcycle cop show on primetime back in those days) and while in a major California highway traffic jam the Duke boys show Ponch and John how to get through traffic by using dynamite armed arrows to blow cars out of the way so that they could get through.

Somewhere between 256 and 321 "General Lee" cars were created and mostly destroyed during the series. Less than 20 in various states of disrepair still exist, according to IMDB. I remember reading a story in a magazine back around 1982 in which they got so desperate for Dodge Chargers that they started putting notes on people's windshields at shopping centers offering to buy them from the owners.

The Dukes of Hazzard was a fun ride through the teenage years. When we were fourteen years old riding our bikes and making jumps it was customary to yell yeehaa!!!!  as we flew through the air with our bikes. Because of this I can still recall in the summer of 1979, the poor little girl next door named Brenda would get spanked by her mom because she would not stop yelling yeehaa! Being the age that we were we thought this was pretty funny.

My friend Nick and I used to sort of poke fun at how television pop culture had sort of infiltrated our own personal history. But as we move forward into time, it  has become even crazier where social media has trivialized or shall I say glorified trivialization. So music and television is woven into who we are when we make references. Our goal is to not be so cliche because everything is cliche now.

I've come to realize that experiences like the Dukes of Hazzard is nothing more than impact on us from a temporary family situation built to generate money.  Somehow this  ended up becoming endeared to us. For the actors as well whom had built relationships among those people that will never go away. Whether it is the Dukes or my recent reading about one of my all-time favorite shows, Northern Exposure, the people that were involved saw it during those days as a job. And now for all of them it represents one of the most amazing experiences ever. A privilege. The best days of their lives.

What the heck am I talking about this for? Because, yes it may be a way for someone to sell paraphernalia in this case Ben Jones, AKA Cooter Davenport. But the fact that after eating dinner last night, I walked two doors down and so enjoyed looking at the General Lee and all of the other vehicles and pieces and souvenirs and pictures that were in this  museum, it became  more evivident that this was much larger than I had expected it to be. My visit was really about paying respect to an amazing moment in time and how it impacted the people that actually worked in it. But I also paid tribute to the effect it had on each and every one of us. The Dukes of Hazzard was going to be a quick and temporary fill in show for 9 weeks. "A three hour tour" if you will.

I have an associative memory, which means different things (acting as memory pegs) cause me to remember other things and in many cases they are not even related to each other. So there are many things but the show represents that take me back to moments when I was 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and so forth. And if something can do that, if you can be brought back for just a moment for just one memory, you might remember something else you have not thought of since then.

 The human mind is wonderful and allowing yourself an indulgence like this can open up doors to memories that seemed to be gone like lost photographs that you wish you could see one more time.  But, are you ready? This is where it gets interesting. It's different for each of us! I actually learned today from a very amazing woman named Poppy Crum that this is a very big thing!  We all have very different experiences coming from the same information. Not only cultural differences but the fundamentals are shaping who we are and how we interpret our environment.  We are constantly changing. We experience things differently from one person to the next. What does this little memory gem bring back for you?

This post got a bit deeper than I expected. Fascinating.