Saturday, October 24, 2009

How Come I Remember This?


Lucy is feeling much better today.  The attached picture shows a much happier countenance than yesterday.  She's not dog-smiling yet, but she's getting closer.
I blogged about salad a couple of posts back, and mentioned that I vividly remember a salad conversation with Heather Ozinsky 15 years ago.  I know nothing else about that day.  Nor, for that matter what year it was.  But I remember that salad remark.  How come our minds work that way, leaving most of our past as a generally remembered sort of fuzzy recollection, while some moments stand out brightly?
One of those amazingly remembered moments occurred in my sophomore year of high school in the fall of 1962.  It was the autumn of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when President Kennedy went nose to nose and eye to eye with the Soviet Premier Kruschev over nuclear warheads in Cuba and Kruschev finally sneezed and blinked.  I'm pretty sure I've mentioned those 13 days at another time in my blogging.  It was a pretty scary stretch in history.  My specific, remembered moment from that time was during my Spanish class.  We were in a brand new high school building, not only worried about our school work but worried about nuclear war as well.  Our Spanish teacher was teaching us something Spanish, when the heating system turned on for the first time ever in our new h.s.  The radiators behind us roared to life.  Everyone in the back row, me included, almost passed out.  The rest of the class jumped, too.  For a split second, we thought they were launching missiles from the courtyard behind us. I don't remember looking at each other and laughing embarrassedly after we jumped, either. It had been too scary.
I suppose there is logic in remembering this traumatic moment from a traumatic time.  But why the salad?

No comments:

Post a Comment