The power of memory...

Isn't it funny how our brains work? I've always been impressed with the way it remembers things we didn't even know we had filed away. I have always had a gift for remembering numbers and trivia, but once in awhile my power of recall goes out on me and I draw a blank. Like, what was the name of the movie where Peter Fonda and Susan Saint James played bank robbers on the run? Do you think I could remember - and this was before the days of just running to imdb.com and looking it up - so I just put it out of my mind, or so I thought. Well, I woke up at two in the morning with the answer, seemingly out of nowhere: Outlaw Blues. I may have consciously stopped looking for the answer, but my brain was stuck in some sort of search do loop and then when the old girl (picture a big purple filing cabinet with overstuffed drawers) spit the punch card into my consciousness, I woke up one trivia answer wiser. I guess that's just another miracle of creation - and how wonderfully we are made!

But every now and then, my brain does some weird stuff with old memories. Maybe yours does, too - and I'd be interested in hearing about it. A few days ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with this sense of actually being in a particular place in the past. I am not sure if it was a dream - or some random neural firing that brought that memory to the surface. At any rate, I was sitting in the car with my father and I was about twelve or thirteen, I guess. We were at Cortez Plaza - as it used to be - with a Belk store and a bakery and an old Publix - and it was so real, I could have sworn that I felt the climate: a warm, humid summer day, with the windows down waiting for my mother to come out of the store and warm bakery smells wafting through the still air. I kept closing my eyes, willing myself to go back to sleep, but the memory persisted. I kept looking around, wondering what it was my subconscious was trying to tell me, but I couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. I finally decided that my brain had treated me to a nice memory of an earlier time; I felt safe and calm and peaceful and I wasn't worried about anything. I haven't felt that way in a long, long time.