Column by Colleen O’Brien

 Nostalgia, redux

February 3, 2021

~a column by Colleen O’Brien

Looking into old boxes as I putter around my house in reclusive pandemic mode, I find two years’ worth of columns dated 1984 and ’85.

“That’s 37 years ago!” I exclaim aloud, unbelieving that that much time has elapsed. I do not feel nearly 40 years older, I think, not looking in a mirror.

The columns were timely to the time or just nostalgia. If it was nostalgia then, it’s ancient history now….

“Sounds’ silent memories,” A Moment with O’Brien,

North Lake Tahoe Bonanza newspaper | February 1, 1984

“A sound can trigger a memory that takes us to a time and place far away and long ago. Music will do this easily – ‘How much is that Doggy in the Window?’ takes me directly to my grandparents’ living room circa 1952. My sisters and I are singing our hearts out for the adoring relatives.

“The drone of a propeller plane is just as effective at removing me from today and plopping me into my childhood. I am lazing in the grass of my backyard identifying shapes of cumulus clouds and feeling an unfamiliar yearning as I track the occasional airplane passing over my town.

“Today when I hear a prop plane I return immediately to that scene from my childhood, and I can feel the tickle of warm grass on my neck, I can see my white house with the green shutters out of the corner of my eye, and I’m that little girl again imagining tiny people in the tiny plane overhead.

“Memory is not the most accurate recording device. It’s possible that scene I see so clearly when I hear the prop planes is an accumulation of many different days spent dreaming in the sun. Maybe it was my sister, or Mikey Steve, the neighbor kid, who said, ‘Think of those tiny little people in that tiny little plane.’

“The sound of sawing and hammering fills me with a sense of well-being and prosperity. I’m the Kool-Aid entrepreneur of the south end of town, where major house-building is taking place. I’m racking in the coins as the carpenters file past for a tall cold one. They flip nickels into my dish, and my Kool-Aid costs only two cents a glass. They don’t want change. Rich, I’m rolling in the dough, jingling the coins in my pocket. I really love the tune of a hammer and saw.

“Not all sounds conjure up pleasant scenes of bucolic days or memories of childhood affluence. One pitch employed by crying babies transports me to that bewildering, exhausting first week of the new mother with her first baby, living again with her parents, her husband in Vietnam. The sound gives me the shivers and makes me feel so sorry for the mom who doesn’t know what she’s doing and for the kid who’s getting madder by the minute because his mother (supposedly his mother, maybe he got the dumb one because of a mix-up in the nursery) is so dense.

“I could go forever and be happy never hearing that breathless, choking ‘lah, lah, lah’ of the newborn. I get suddenly tired and feel ridiculously young and stupid and trapped.

“The rhythmic clank of chains on crunchy snow, a sound common to this area, is a sound I hadn’t heard for 15 years. I didn’t know till I moved to the mountains that the sound of tire chains would jog a scene out of the back of my mind that I’d not considered for nearly two decades. It’s a day in the life of a teenager, where we clung to car fenders on the slick winter streets and got a thrill of a ride – until one of the kids hit a patch of pavement that sent him sprawling all over the street, blood gushing from his head.

“The car he’d been hanging onto drove clinkety clankety down the street, unaware of the foolish kid left bleeding in its wake. The sound of snow chains does it to me now – triggers that memory of blood on the snow and my friend lying there looking dead.

“He wasn’t. He was barely hurt. But for a few seconds it was horror and shock, and for that incident to return in full Technicolor simply because I hear a sound of chains on snow is still frightening.

“Not every sound triggers a scene from the first time we heard it or because of some significant even that occurred when the sound was going on. If that were so, we’d be deluged with memory scenes at every sound, on overload in no time. The brain is, if not discriminating, at least selective, in its cause-and-effect memories.

“The certain sounds we hear that put immediate fear in our hearts are often connected with scenes we don’t remember. There is no time and place that we can figure out, simply a fear that seems to have no basis: a door slammed loudly makes me unwarrantedly apprehensive. I don’t know what occurred in my past to instigate this anxiety, for there is no accompanying scene. It’s probably just the reaction to a loud noise, but the fast-beating heart continues for some time.

“The idea of sounds triggering memories might be put to good use. And it could be tested: Teaching algebraic equations and chemistry’s periodic table of elements accompanied by a loud bong on a bell or a growl or a squealing tire? Like Pavlov’s method, it might prove to be a more effective way of utilizing that great storage area in the head. Waiting for random sounds to reveal memory is such a haphazard way to live and learn.