I find the experience of a sudden memory coming back, triggered by a sight, sound, or smell to be startling. The memory will come on, and I remember something that I really think I have not thought about for years.
Is this a biological preposition to take all the new events, new locations, new technologies as 'common', as if ones life has always been lived as one is living right now? Do our memories need triggers, or is our focus narrow in a way that can only sustain the here and now?
Surely I hear people say "What did we do before mobile phones or laptop computers"? I say this, but when I try to recall exactly what I did, I find those memories hard to conjure up on command.
Sometimes, I know I think idly about how when I was young we had a telephone on a 'party line', so that each phone had its own ring, our ring was long-long-short. A different ring meant the phone call wasn't for your home. The party line also meant that people living in neighboring houses would pick up while you were on a phone call. I believe that this thought is not a thought that takes up any space in a teenagers head.
The other day I went to the bank and saw this Platypus bank. An incentive for kids to open an account, save their coins (which by the way a common Australian coin is a coin worth two dollars), and learn about banking.
As I recognized the platypus figurine as a bank I remembered the 'Crocker Dog'.
The Crocker dog was a bank, in the form of a Crocker Spaniel, for Crocker Bank, a Californian bank that was later folded into a bank which still remains in business called 'Wells Fargo Bank'.
How had I forgotten my dog bank? How had I forgotten going through the drive through, and the money going into a clear tube, and that tube air vacuumed though pipes into the bank? Or how the tube would return not just with a receipt for the transaction but a lollipop!
Is this a biological preposition to take all the new events, new locations, new technologies as 'common', as if ones life has always been lived as one is living right now? Do our memories need triggers, or is our focus narrow in a way that can only sustain the here and now?
Surely I hear people say "What did we do before mobile phones or laptop computers"? I say this, but when I try to recall exactly what I did, I find those memories hard to conjure up on command.
Sometimes, I know I think idly about how when I was young we had a telephone on a 'party line', so that each phone had its own ring, our ring was long-long-short. A different ring meant the phone call wasn't for your home. The party line also meant that people living in neighboring houses would pick up while you were on a phone call. I believe that this thought is not a thought that takes up any space in a teenagers head.
The other day I went to the bank and saw this Platypus bank. An incentive for kids to open an account, save their coins (which by the way a common Australian coin is a coin worth two dollars), and learn about banking.
As I recognized the platypus figurine as a bank I remembered the 'Crocker Dog'.
The Crocker dog was a bank, in the form of a Crocker Spaniel, for Crocker Bank, a Californian bank that was later folded into a bank which still remains in business called 'Wells Fargo Bank'.
How had I forgotten my dog bank? How had I forgotten going through the drive through, and the money going into a clear tube, and that tube air vacuumed though pipes into the bank? Or how the tube would return not just with a receipt for the transaction but a lollipop!
1 comment:
that was hilarious! i spit my juice out.
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