I wonder if a no-vacancy sign ever is placed on the door leading to the brain’s compartment where memories are stored.
Sights, sounds and smells have a way of triggering memories that have laid dormant, sometimes for years. And when they do, scenarios played out in your mind’s eye seem as real as if they occurred yesterday.
Thursday evening we were in Cherryvale to watch grandson Noah, an eighth-grader at Humboldt, play football.
When we drove into town it occurred to me that one of the first games I played in junior high was there, and I also recalled the name of a player on the Cherryvale team, Jerry Parker, even though the game was played 56 years ago.
Jerry may not have been as outstanding as I remembered, though. I asked several locals and none remembered him. Maybe it was just that we both were so young and his skills, advanced for his age, made an impression on the kid trying to tackle him.
A while back we saw “Buddy — The Buddy Holly Story” at the New Theatre Restaurant in Kansas City.
The music, all popular in the late 1950s, was amazing, and if there had been room, and my legs could have stood it, I might have swept Beverly out of her chair and danced down the aisle. Come to think of it, she suggested as much.
The songs reminded me of sock hops in the Humboldt High gym and parties we had, including some in a little building at what today is called Camp Hunter Park. The first few, again in junior high, usually had the boys sitting one side of the room, the girls the other.
Eventually, that changed and I found that dancing cheek-to-cheek, to such tunes as Holly’s “True Love Ways,” was the cat’s meow.
There was a time when we journeyed to Tulsa once a month to sell at a huge Saturday flea market on the fairgrounds.
We’d arrive well before dawn, and en route to the fairgrounds drove past a large Wonder Bread bakery. Invariably, the odor of fresh-baked bread filled the air and if I wasn’t hungry before, I would be after catching a whiff.
It reminded me of when I was young and seldom a day went by without my grandmother pulling something good to eat from the oven. Oftentimes it was bread, but there also were some of the best pies on the face of the earth.
It never occurred to Meme — that’s what I called her — to enter a pie-baking contest, but if she had, she would have won hands down.
—Bob Johnson
Always room for a few more memories
