As I run every red light on Memory Lane...

The first thing I remember is living in a yellow house. I don't know why I remember that, but I do. I remember playing with a fire truck on the living room floor while my dad was napping on the sofa, and I would wake him from time to time to ask him for a tool to fix my broken vehicle. It wasn't really broken, but I clearly had early ambitions of becoming a fire truck mechanic. He patiently took a penny out of his shirt pocket, I used it to "repair" the truck, and then handed it back to Dad, only to repeat the whole procedure over again as soon as he dozed off I'm sure.

Why do I remember things like this, but have a difficult time remembering my own home telephone number, or which day exactly does trash day fall on?

I remember living on a cul-de-sac called Syracuse Cove in Austin when my twin sisters were born. We lived there until I was five and a half (those half years were very important to me at the time). I still remember the address too. We had a collie named Butch and Deanna and Kim lived a few houses down and across the street. I remember having a dream that I went across the street to play football with the big kids, but I got scared when every play ended up in a huge pile of tangled arms and legs and bodies. Funny, huh?

We moved then to a house on Sierra Madre where the alleged goat incident took place. I remember the address there too. Butch made the move and stayed with us until we gave him to my Uncle Curly in Houston. We had another dog named Mike. He was an awesome pet too, bigger than Butch, still very gentle with us kids.

We moved to Houston when I was in the fourth grade. I hated my new school, and didn't think too highly of my new teacher either. I was miserable there. We lived with my mom's mother and father for a few months and then moved across town. We did a lot of moving around Houston. I remember having a yo-yo while we lived on Gardenia Ave with my grandparents. I also remember the smells of my grandmother's cooking every evening and the television shows that they watched while I laid on the living room floor and pretended to understand what we were viewing.

I think it's fun sometimes, to take a ride down Memory Lane. I've had some wonderful times in my life, and I get a warm feeling when I relive some of those times. There's a need for a big yellow caution sign at the entrance to this path however. When I find myself spending too much time there, things in the present go unnoticed or lacking their due attention. So I don't spend a lot of time on Memory Lane, but I do like to go there on occasion because there is a wealth of information just waiting down that road for me to come back and grab it. It's not always by choice that I find myself thinking about things down on that lane either... there's usually something that jolts me right back to a specific moment in time.

It's funny, the things that elicit certain memories. Humans have memory triggers that set off very strong recollections of past experiences. A memory trigger can be a sound, a particular scent, or something you see that flashes us back into our past. These triggers cause us to relive long ago times so intensely, nothing else exists but the moment we are reliving. Memories relived so strongly, so vividly, that we feel the same feelings we felt when the memory was born.

I find that certain smells can be the most powerful of triggers, at least in my case.

The smell of cedar trees takes me back to the woods where I roamed and explored with Payson. We stalked unseen deer and raccoons and the occasional armadillo. We found clearings that we would immediately turn into our club headquarters, only to never be able to find again. We took hikes up and down the creek, ate lunches in fields of clover, took our first hits of tobacco products, and that wonderful smell of cedar was in the background, with us always.

The smell of pot roast stirs up pleasant memories of my grandmother's cooking. When I was a kid, I never tired of Grandma's pot roast with potatoes and carrots. There might be corn on the cob, always some fresh baked dinner rolls. I so looked forward to these dinners that I was uncharacteristically oblivious to any desserts that were waiting for us after the main meal. The possible choices at my grandparents house was staggering too... apple pies, pecan pies, cakes, Jell-o or pudding, fresh baked cookies, Blue Bell ice cream, banana pudding... the list goes on and on. The table would be set, all that food was out there and smelling so delicious, and we would sit down at our regular places, say a prayer, and commence to partake of our spoils... what I like to call "The laying on of dinner."

Boiled eggs remind me of the time my father and I spent the night in our front yard waiting for a lunar eclipse. We never saw it, or at least I never saw it... Dad might have but I fell asleep. We ate Easter eggs from the week before so boiled eggs equal lunar eclipse. See? And when I think about that night waiting for the moon to darken, I invariably recall how I used to get up early on Saturday mornings to watch "Heckle & Jeckle" and sometimes Dad would get up early to watch with me, and then go back to bed. All that from the smell of boiled eggs.

Certain perfumes remind me of different girls I dated. Amusement parks have that scent about them that bring forth memories of my summer working at Astroworld in Houston. Even the aroma of freshly cut grass will often cause an instantaneous flashback to my teenage years when I used to cut my grandfather's lawn. Yes, smells can most assuredly jog us to some pretty cool remembrances.

Music is another one for me. The first song I remember really liking was "Dream Dream Dream" by the Everly Brothers. Today, when I hear it, I remember the elementary school I was going to at the time, all the way down to the layout of my third grade classroom, the playground, the cafeteria, and where my mom picked me up after school. Paul Muriat's "Love is Blue" puts me right on the banks of the Pedernales River, fishing with my father in about 1968 or so.

Anything disco causes a usually funny reflection of my mid-teenage years. Barry Manilow stirs up different memories, Led Zeppelin still others, and a wide variety of songs of the era generate an equally wide variety of memories. I, for one, am not opposed to this either.

Most of the memories I have are good ones, and I enjoy going back and reliving them for a few short moments. Some are not so pleasant or fun to recall, but either way, they have become fuel for many of the things I write about for this blog.

Old photographs are another good memory jogger. (Side note: Have you ever heard someone say "This is a picture of me when I was younger"? How can a picture of someone not be of when they were younger? I'd like just once to see a picture taken of someone of when they were older. End of side note.) I see pictures of me on vacations and at school and in different situations and times of my life that conjures up memories of those times. Isn't that, after all, why we take photos in the first place... so we can remember the emotions we were experiencing when we took them? It sure works for me.

So when is the last time you took a ride or a stroll down Memory Lane? There's much to be seen and heard and even re-experienced there, if you'll only take the time to go once in a while. I'm not suggesting that we spend an unhealthy amount of time with this, but in order to have a full and complete perspective on ourselves, we all must examine the little things from our own personal histories that have made us who we are today.

It's not always pretty, it's not always fun, and it really shouldn't always be pleasant... but it should be accessible to us whenever we see the need for self evaluation, shouldn't it? There are people who keep every greeting card they've ever received, and there are others who barely tear the envelope before tossing its contents. I tend to be the former and I don't get the latter. Each of these habits is demonstrative of a particular worldview. While some people struggle to hold onto the past and, as the cliché goes, "keep their memories alive," there are just as many people who push forward into the future without ever looking back.

Conventional wisdom suggests that living in the past is non-productive and a waste of time at best, and unhealthy, even dangerous at worst. I tend to agree with that assessment, but that's not really what I'm talking about. Let me explain the difference as I see it. Living in the past is hoping and wishing for a time that can never be regained, while taking trips down Memory Lane is looking at the past, and gaining information from it.

We are all limited as far as how many things we can focus on at one time to one. One thing at any given moment. That's not to say we don't notice other events in our surroundings, we do... but our conscious mind can pay close attention to really only one thing at a time. Therefore, if we are spending too much of our lives living in the past, we can't be really focusing on the present, or even preparing for the future, can we?

I think Thomas S. Monson said it best when he gave the following counsel:

The past is behind, learn from it.

The future is ahead, prepare for it.

The present is here, live it.

I trust that good advice, and I just hope that I will always have the time to take a trip into my past every now and again without being in such a hurry that I feel as though I have to run every red light on Memory Lane while I'm there.

I'm concerned that I might drive right by those wonderful learning opportunities.

Until next time...