Memory Jog

This is your brain on macaroni with a side of fried memory.

If the genetic memory within cells can summon up traits in reproduction, why can't I recall the name of the person I just met 5 minutes ago? I'd like to blame it on the bleach headiness, but the sad truth is I think I had the same memory issues when I wasn't blonde... but I can't remember. Is the brain like a hard drive and can I upgrade to zettabytes? How do I get it to auto-save? Does it automatically empty the trash bin of memories not used for decades to make room for more?

It's embarrassing to have to continually ask someone's name introduced to you less than a minute before. I've tried the name game trick and relating the face or a feature with the name and even making silly rhymes. Tracy... racy, Macy's, parade, jade, fade, spade, dig, pig, fig... what was your name again? Sorry... my mind wanders. And my disc needs to be defragmented.

Coming back to Crested Butte after a 20-year journey through life elsewhere, I was reunited with people who remembered more about my past than I did. Although, I'm not sure their perspective of the events was viewed from the same angle as mine if I could remember it.

“Don't you remember Franko the Magician?” one particularly sharp friend impishly smirked when I looked blankly at the ground, trying to conjure up an image of anyone named Franko with a wand.

“You certainly came to work the next day thinking he was magic...” Later that evening, disturbed that I couldn't bring to mind someone uniquely romantic enough to be dressed in renaissance threads and traveling in a gypsy wagon, I suddenly remembered that I was trying to make my band learn Magic Man (by Heart) around the same time Franko's bohemian bus rolled out of town. But I still couldn't evoke specifics about meeting the magician, who was also a hypnotist...

As if to mock me, my mind will pull a visually detailed memory out of no where, completely unrelated to the moment, just a flash of a fragment – the marble stoop we sat on as young kids, a dusty corner from my teenage bedroom or the way the light fell into the window of a home 10 years ago. What triggers that visual when I can't remember where I left my keys, glasses, hat or drink?

Do genetic memories make us predisposed to certain preferences? There's a certain amount of cellular duplication passed on from parents to child – can parents' experiences be genetically shared on some level? This could explain why all teenagers are annoying to their parents... an endless cycle of retribution. It would then stand to reason that I am re-experiencing my grandmothers' flair for clothing, music and dance as a past life experience. It’s not my fault, it’s my ancestors’.

Riding along in the clanking tin cans of a local train to my family's ancestral home in southern Italy, I was stunned to discover the region was mountainous. No one had ever mentioned we hailed from magnificently tall green peaks that surrounded our house still occupied by the descendants of those who arrived in the 1500s. On a smaller, more ancient scale it was reminiscent of my own chosen mountain town home... but without the skiing, costumes or bars. I wondered if my love of vertical landscape could have originated from collective genetic memory of place.

They say if you can remember the 60s you weren't really there. What is it that makes a VW summon thoughts buried in a haze of purple nights and sunshine days? It's the gasoline and the horsehair seat stuffing. They always smell like part gas and part funky, musky wild animal and the combo jogs those memories loose from the back folds of grey matter. Someone tested the theory that the olfactory, the sense of smell, could bring forth strong memory, so college kids were given chocolate wrappers when studying and then again during the exam. The results were astounding for the group sniffing the wrappers. Maybe I just need more chocolate... enough to wake the deep-sixed.