Random Snapshot Memory Moments

Photo: L. Weikel

Every once in a while I have a peculiar experience that is both strange and inexplicable. It’s simple, really. Simple, yet profoundly odd.

The best way I can describe it is as follows: I’ll be standing in the little nook of our kitchen, to the left of our sink, where I keep our espresso machine. I’m most often either grinding the beans or waiting for the brew to drip into my cup, when I’m suddenly reliving a ‘snapshot moment’ in which I’m transported back to a town in Vermont in the early afternoon, in a small bookshop.

It’s the weirdest thing. And it’s happened to me many times over the years. The exact same trigger taking me to the exact same moment in time that I actually experienced.

Snapshot Moment

The five of us were on a mini-vacation, having taken a jaunt up to Vermont after attending a travel soccer tournament probably somewhere in Massachusetts, although it may have been upstate New York.

That’s part of the weirdness of this ‘snapshot moment.’ I have little recollection of any of the details surrounding the rest of the trip. I just know we were in Vermont. I’m reasonably sure I could even pinpoint the exact village if I had to come up with it – which is the benefit of my journaling.

But that’s not actually the point.

It’s this absolutely vivid ‘transport’ I experience. I assume it must have something to do with the smell of the coffee or something, although the moment in time to which I’m transported does not, as far as I can tell, involve coffee.

Why Does This Happen?

I think that’s part of the reason I find this experience so odd. Inevitably, when I get ‘flipped back’ in that way – momentarily – I always find myself wondering what triggered it. And then my second thought inevitably is, “Why does this happen?”

This experience always serves to remind me that I never know, from one day to the next – one moment to the next – when an experience is going to be so indelibly seared into my brain that I will recall it, perhaps randomly, for the rest of my life.”

Another moment I remember and which is indelibly imprinted in my brain is driving with my mom in our car on Route 22 in Easton, after having just dropped my sister off at her high school. My sister was probably 15 or 16, so I was six or seven years old. I was in the front seat, and I remember my mother and I having a conversation about words.

I Remember Thinking “How ‘Silly’ a Word…”

Specifically, I remember telling my mom that I’d heard kids at school talking about that part of a boy’s anatomy that makes them different from girls. I don’t actually remember how the topic came up or how I phrased my question – I think I wanted to know if those words were ‘real.’ But what I remember is my mother, in that moment, telling me the proper word to be used. And I distinctly remember stifling my laughter (or perhaps I didn’t actually succeed at stifling it, come to think of it) because I thought that word was absolutely hilarious, as it so closely resembled ‘peanuts.’

I randomly remember that conversation (again, never knowing what might trigger that specific memory) and yet I remember exactly where the car was on that stretch of road and viscerally remember that sense of internally giggling to myself and thinking how silly a word it was.

Random Moments – Persistent Memories

If I tried, I could probably think of at least another half dozen or more ‘random snapshot memory moments’ like these. And I just have to wonder about the nature of memory.

What makes certain moments imprint themselves so deeply that we recall them throughout our lives? I would understand if these instances were profound in some way – traumatic, for instance. And I do have some memories like that. But the ones I just recounted are certainly not traumatic. (Don’t even go there with the associations…ha ha.)

I’m not sure why I wrote about this tonight, beyond the fact that I probably <<blinked>> back to that afternoon in Vermont while making my coffee this morning, and it made me think.

A random moment in my life. A random – if persistent – memory.