strange connections

Sometimes, when I'm working and it is boring (and how many times can you do the same job with no differences without it being boring) and the halls are noisy, I put on my headphones and turn the classical music on my Ipod to shuffle.  The assumption is that it is to relax me, but boring does not really call for relaxing.  I drink my coffee and the music causes my brain to travel--not far, the job is in no danger, but the computer is slow, so while the little circle slowly spins, I think and with the classics, I remember.

For some reason, when the big drum, or the cymbals, or certain runs on the piano start, I can see the TV of my childhood, and feel my parents sitting to my left, eating popcorn or ice cream while i'm snuggled under a quilt. Late night television; those old black and white movies that were the bread and butter of after-the-news entertainment, almost always used the classics for their soundtracks.  Early Disney cartoons did, also.  But watching the old shows doesn't put me back in my childhood, it just reminds me of how glad I am that we now have color on more than cartoons and how cheezy some of those old movies were.

At any rate, doing my repetitive and boring work with my long gone parents sitting in the dark behind me is very comforting.

My point is, anything can be the connection.  I used to want a blue popsicle every time I smelled DDT.  No one ever purposefully gave me DDT, but they sprayed it on the dump about the same time the ice cream man came when I was four.  I loved blue popsicles back when I was four, and from then till it was outlawed (probably later, those DDT stashes were loved by farmers and all my family were farm folks).

Smells, music, tastes--not like chicken, but like paw-paws or persimmons or really soft blackberries,  and occasionally some strangely perfumed cleaner or body wash that makes me think of the medicine I was given when I was sick.  Kid medicine has changed in the last 50 years, these days its bubble gum or cotton candy.
Sometimes a shadow from a tree will remind me of a conversation sitting on a rock wall with an uncle gone almost 40 years.  Sometimes the memory will almost make me dizzy, as if my feet are fully on the earth, as if I might be hurtling through time.  Sometimes these strange mental connections make me miss someone so much i could cry.  Other times its like I have them back for a moment, a tiny blessing brought by the wind.

I don't understand the human brain or the memory connections that create such things.  I understand the human soul even less, but such memories make me think we have a soul.  Something that hooks us to a universe that is beyond time and space, something behind the physical.  Could it be my own loose screw?  Sure.  But it might be my favorite.