While in Portland this last weekend, GTB would be driving me through some vaguely familiar neighborhood and I’d say something like, “Isn’t Lloyd Center right over there?” or “Are we close to the Convention Center?” I hadn’t been to Portland in at least four years, but growing up in Hometown, it was the closest thing we had to a city. It’s where we’d go see the Nutcracker at Christmas, buy back-to-school clothes, and pay visits to any doctor who could do things more complicated than our community clinic could. So it’s not terribly surprising that the town still feels like home in a small way.<\/p>\n
Before GTB and I parted ways, I …ahem… borrowed some music from his extensive iTunes collection. I was so happy to have new stuff to blast on the drive home. The first thing I listened to was the White Stripes. I’d borrowed Elephant from Joe and BFE a while back and could sort of halfway sing along with the songs. I kept messing up, but wrote it off to the time that has passed since I last listened to it. Then I put on Journey. I know every word to “Don’t Stop Believing.” (Heaven is a funky moose!) And then I listened to Prince. I not only know all the words to pretty much everything on both 1999 and Purple Rain, but I remember the grunts and “Uh”s too. <\/p>\n
This, combined with the memories of Portland that cropped up from the dark recesses of my cobwebby mind, has me reflecting on how memory works. I can barely remember how to get to the freeway from my own apartment, but I could drive you to the largest Nordstrom in Portland. I can’t seem to add new song lyrics to my head, but any song written before 1989 is firmly implanted. <\/p>\n
Is it the pot I smoked during and right after college? Is it the many many years of many many beer-drinking nights? It can’t be that I’m running out of room in my head. There isn’t that much in there anyway. Do our brains lose the kind of plasticity that made it possible to memorize “Darling Nikki” far before we actually understood what the words meant? <\/p>\n
Is this just part of getting old? Shit! It is, isn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While in Portland this last weekend, GTB would be driving me through some vaguely familiar neighborhood and I’d say something like, “Isn’t Lloyd Center right over there?” or “Are we close to the Convention Center?” I hadn’t been to Portland in at least four years, but growing up in Hometown, it was the closest thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hickopolis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}