They say that scent is the sense most strongly related to memory. Hmm, I don't know. I have a decent sense of smell--I can sniff out a boxwood tree from a mile away because they're so putrid and vile--but I have never once gotten a whiff of something, pleasant or otherwise, and been mentally transported back to some other time and place.
For me, this proverbial trip down memory lane comes with music. When I hear certain songs, I am instantly brought back to a time and place from the days of yore. (At 32, am I allowed to call something 'yore'? I wonder.) I used to chaperone dances at GV, and the DJ would invariably play some "old school" songs to break up the monotony of the current hip-hop and top 40. When those songs came on, I would, without fail, turn to a colleague standing next to me on Grind Patrol and say "this song came out when I was [insert age or grade here]!" The next Monday in class, I might tease my seniors about grinding to music that they played at my middle school dances. (Ok, so I wasn't actually allowed to go to middle school dances, but they don't know that.) Although I probably wouldn't bat a thousand, I can with some degree of certainty tell you what year and maybe season a song came out if I have an emotional tie to it like that.
Of course, a lot of these songs (some of which are not good songs, mind you) for one reason or another, remind me of guys I dated. I can't hear "Shoop" without thinking of High School Boyfriend 1, who bought me Salt N Pepa's album Very Necessary and a bottle of Clinique's Sunflowers perfume as a little present that he gave me in the parking lot of my high school one day when he came to surprise me after school. HSBF2 and I used to play guitar and sing, and one of our favorites was "Give a Little Bit" by Supertramp. "Mo' Money" was a popular song my freshman year of college, and I remember spending Friday nights at Sig Ep dance parties with CBF1 and our friends; I can also remember-sadly-where I was when the Backstreet Boys' video to "Larger Than Life" debuted on MTV, because he and I were sitting in the Hard Rock Cafe in Tel Aviv. CBF2 sang in the coed a cappella group and had "Be With You" as his solo, and my senior year, my a cappella solo was Alanis Morrisette's "You Already Won Me Over," which I sang to my then-boyfriend, CBF3. Several months later, he came to visit me in California, and when I picked him up from the airport and turned on the car, it was playing on the radio. RWBF1 made me this fantastic mixed CD as a gift, and songs like "Bonnie and Clyde" by Jay-Z and "Born Too Late" by a little indie band from Pittsburgh take me back to my first year of teaching and living on my own in Philly, dating a guy across the bridge in NJ. Nickelback's pathetic-attempt-at-satire "Rock Star" always makes me smile, because STBEH and I used to sing it in the car; there's a line about quesadillas, and getting takeout from Chipotle was never the same.
Lest you think me nothing but boy crazy, not every song-memory I have is romantically linked. PDiddy's remix of Sting's "I'll be Watching You" brings me back to the summer after I graduated high school, driving around town with Brittany; "California Love" by the late Tupac is a favorite for me and Kristen, because nearly every time we'd have an impromptu sleepover in her basement, we'd fall asleep watching MTV and wake up to that video playing at some ridiculous hour of the night. Back in 7th grade, Kristi and I taped--yes, taped--"Jump Around" from the radio and painstakingly did the play-pause-play-pause game in order to write down the lyrics so we could learn them all. (Seriously, tapes?) My volleyball team made several warm-up mixes that we played before games, and countless songs remind me of the nerves I felt before every match, coupled with the absolute joy of getting to know 20+ kids in that capacity. I even remember which Christina Aquilera song one of my Philly kids choreographed for their dance show, and how shocked--I mean, cartoon eyeballs bugging out of my head shocked--I was when one of my favorite female students got on stage as a dead-ringer for the pop star.
Music ties us to a time and place, even if sometimes it's seemingly meaningless (can you hear "What is Love?" without doing the head nod? Doubt it.) Books may allow us to escape into another world, but music brings us back to portions of our own worlds. At this very moment, I'm on the couch, snuggling with my favorite pup, watching a VH1 90s one-hit-wonder retrospective, reliving all of the memories--painful, joyful or otherwise--from middle school, high school and parts of college. And it never stops--years from now, I'll look back on this time in my life, and think fondly about the significance of "Bust Your Windows" and "Sunday Kind of Love." There are songs that don't exist yet that will make me think of people I haven't met yet.
Nietzsche said that without music, life would be a mistake. I say, all of our mistakes come with music.
And for some, the mistake is the music. But enough about Vanilla Ice.
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