Step Inside a Memory

Last evening I was watching Neil deGrasse Tyson's mini-series "Cosmos." My head always spins at warp speed during that program: my brain reaching to understand what he just said before he jumps Universes to another thought. (Thank goodness for commercials.  I am not sure my brain could handle 60 minutes straight with Tyson.) 

Somewhere in last night's dizzying episode, Tyson said something that so pierced me with possibilities that my brain didn't even try to figure out the point he was making.

"Step inside a memory." 

I truly don't know where the rock-star astrophysicist went with that, but I just moved into my own Universe.  What a really cool concept!  Stepping inside a memory.  If I could step inside a memory, I could go back to all the special moments and all the important people of my life, again and again.  And if I could step inside a memory, I might even get a do-over on the times that didn't end up the way I wished they had.  I'm liking this idea a lot.

Yet even as I revelled in the possibilities of stepping inside a memory, I realized that miracle already exists.  As human beings we have the incredible ability to travel through time at any moment through our memories and imagination. 

A friend sent me a link to picture on the web of something we did together almost 30 years ago, and it was just like yesterday.  When I stepped inside that memory, I could see the sites and smell the smells as if I were there today.

My kitchen walls are covered with photographs of travel to Italy, and I can...and do...gaze on one occasionally...and just drift back in time.  I can taste that wild boar with chocolate in the rich, rich sauce with toasted pinenuts as if it were yesterday.  (Finest meal ever, I think.) I can remember the tenderness of a gaze and the gentleness of a touch as if it were yesterday. 

I can remember vigorous political conversations after dinner with my father who has been gone almost 30 years now, and it's funny to think about it, but as I step into that memory, I recall his smell. A mixture of tobacco that had gotten into his skin from years of smoking and grease from the machinery he worked on, muscling up through the bouquet of Irish Spring soap.  I am not sure I've ever consciously thought about that before, yet the smell is in my memory.

"Step inside a memory."

Step inside a memory, indeed.  What an awe-inspiring...and ever present...possibility!