I find it curious just how easily a powerful association can be forged. Take the song above, every time I hear it, every time I head just the opening bars of that melody, my minds instantly flies back through the decades to a metropolitan transit buss, a cold cloudy grey winter’s day and the song playing though the headphones of my Walkman.

It was the winter of 1987 and I was taking courses at San Diego City College. One of my classes was an introduction to Western Civilization. I enjoyed the course, found the material fascinating, but what sticks with me is the crush I had on a fellow student, Suhara.

I had just come out of a relationship, adrift in the Sargasso of isolation when romance has failed, and found Suhara utterly compelling. She was an Iraqi, and it was from her that I learned the proper pronunciation of Iraq, looked like an Arabic Kirstie Alley, was smart as a whip — she was supplementing her course work at UCSD, and was engaged to be married, so there was never any possibility of a relationship beyond study partners and a passing friendship.

The winter of that semester as finals approached we made a study date at the library on the campus of UCSD and that was the cause of that afore mentioned bus trip. I brought along a couple of cassette tapes of music to pass the time as the bus ride took nearly an hour; isn’t mass transit grand? As I sat there, my head against the window, I can’t read on a moving vehicle and so music was my solace, the cool class against my forehead, the slate grey clouds spanning the sky from horizon to horizon, the song played, and forged an association that is unbroken to this day.

The thing is it isn’t even really about Suhara. I doubt that today I could honestly pull her out of a line up of similar looking women. It was a crush, an infatuation; we didn’t know each other enough for anything more significant to have formed emotionally. But still the song, the bus ride, that winter’s day, is forever locked together in my mind, a tangled knot that can never be unwound. That’s the power of the human mind to form links between experiences and their emotional triggers. It’s one of the defining elements of our existence that the powerful emotional reactions imprint on our selves and follow us for the rest of our years.

Be kind to each other, be good to each other, you never know what impression you are making that will echo through the decades.

Post Script:

And on the short drive from home to work what song played on the radio? California Dreaming.