The Faded Smell of Memory

There's a line from a James McMurtry song that has always stuck in my head since I first processed it. I don't know the name of the song, but it's on "Where'd You Hide the Body." Anyway, he has a line in this song about waking up in a world where everything was "like the streets of a town where I lived when I was too young to drive." Everything is familiar, but nothing has a name. The story of my world is the opposite: the names and facts from my past remain, but the essence is gone.

I am always amazed by people who can relive and bring to life people and episodes from their past (both major and trivial). I am marrying one of those people, and we happen to live four blocks from where she grew up. So for her, the past and her childhood are as real as the streets we walk and drive on. Things are a bit foggier for me.

Odors, more than any other sense, are supposedly the best at rekindling memories and their associated emotion. If I remember my grad school neurology correctly, it's because the olfactory cortex and hippocampus are neighbors. So, in the past month, I got a wiff of a Port-A-Potty and suddenly had the nervous energy I got before running the 5k in a college track meet, some window cleaner at work made me feel like I was in an ex-girlfriend's bathroom, and the smell of fresh leaves on our deck had me re-living my first summer out of college.




The point to all of this: these remote memories are all no more than 11 years old. Where have I stored years 1 through 20 of my life?

I bring this up because I am going to San Francisco this weekend, where I lived for a summer with my dad (when I was somewhere between seven and nine years old). And I have fond, vague memories of the place. But I remember the facts well: going to my first baseball game ever (A's vs. Mariners), The Exploritorium, playing with a dog named Heather, and completing multi-day long games of Monopoly with my grandma. All very specific memories, no doubt, but their essence is gone. Remembering these facts are no different than remembering that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln or that the Golgi bodies are organelles at the cellular level that prepare enzymes for secretion. They are just facts that I can recall that, as far as I can tell, have no real effect on me. I would like to think that I am more attached to my past than the facts that I remember from 9th grade biology.

I lost close family members and a very close friend since I moved to the Twin Cities. It scares me to think that one day my memories of them will fade away like my lost feelings for my first car, elementary school auditorium, and even my childhood kitchen. Who knows, maybe once I get to the Bay Area, see Fisherman's Wharf and go to the Exploritorium all these memories will come flooding back and suddenly I will be whole again.