Memory Triggers
Last night, I went to the Mexican Restaurant where Matt (my hubby for anyone new here) performs every Friday. I often take Riley and Reagan there to see Matt play live and to eat their addictive (calorie laden) food. Kaelan prefers to stay home and fills in as babysitter. Well last night, I took Reagan and Leo because Leo had such a long late nap and wasn't ready to go to bed yet. It was nicely crowded and Matt even had the bar crowd dancing and doing an impromptu conga line. :)
On the way home, we were listening to Sirius-XM. Reagan and I were battling it out as to which station we were going to listen to (he prefers rap or first wave 80's) and we landed on the 70's channel. A Frankie Valli song ended and Tony Orlando's "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree" came on the radio. Reagan quickly tried to change the channel, but I stopped him. I told him how my dad and mom (Grumpa and Moogie to my kids) used to sing that song all the time when I was a kid whether we were at home or in the car whenever it came on the radio.
So, I started to sing along and was suddenly hit by an overwhelmingly bittersweet memory flashing back to all of us in a car (my parents and 3 of my other siblings because the last two weren't born yet). We were all belting it out with Tony Orlando singing the chorus, "Tie a yellow ribbon 'round the ole oak tree, it's been 3 long years, do you still want me...." As the memory filled my mind, I choked up and I couldn't sing anymore, tears filled my eyes. I just sat there driving enveloped in the memory and writing about it right now, I'm tearing up again.
What is that? It doesn't happen very often for me to have these emotional memory triggers just out of the blue, but when it does, I'm struck hard really wishing I could go back and recapture that very moment in time and live through it again. I would have been about 6 or 7 when this song was popular and I'd love to know where we were going that day to leave such a strong impression. Maybe we were headed to Dairy Queen for ice cream or on a road trip to Florida, Michigan or Vermont. The details are fuzzy, but the emotion involved is very strong. We were happy and having fun. It seems to me like our more recent memories override many of our childhood memories until something via one of our senses like a song or a certain food triggers a flashback.
As I continued on my drive home after the song ended, I reminisced about my siblings, my childhood, and especially my parents. Call me crazy, but I actually kinda miss riding in a car going on trips with all of them. We have so many hilarious, insane, silly and even awful stories of our vacations involving cars, trucks and even RV's. They all make me smile now just thinking about them.
It really made me stop and think how Matt and I need to try harder at creating similar happy memories for our kids. I feel like sometimes we miss fun opportunities to just be spontaneous or adventurous with our kids due to their many special needs. We talk ourselves out of so many activities because it just seems too hard to make the effort.
But just yesterday afternoon (before all this happened), Matt and I actually went bike riding with the two girls. We had never done that with them before. We dusted off the bike trailer we've had since the boys were little. We rode on the old railroad trail paved for our town's recreation and enjoyment. At the South end of the trail sits a very old bridge built in 1919. It's one of those cool high arched concrete railroad bridges you see scattered over the US. We got off the bikes and walked down deep into the forest on a wooden walkway that ended up near the shoreline of the creek that runs below the bridge. We looked at little tiny fish, skipped (or threw if you are me and Dasha) rocks into the water, listened to our echos under the bridge (Matt even yodeled- envision the mountain climber game song on Price Is Right) and overall had a wonderful time creating what I hope will be a fond memory for the girls to remember when they're older. It's just too bad we didn't have a song playing in the background to help trigger the memory.
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