Step 1: State your thesis.    Insert a coin in a jukebox and your selection of a 45 rpm melody is pulled out, laid down and played.  Your selection could be anywhere from Patsy Cline to Elvis. The mind is a jukebox. My mind is a jukebox that pulls out a memory, lays it down and plays it without my conscious prompt, permission, or volition. 

Step 2: Support your thesis.    Yesterday I thought, ‘Covid can’t last forever,’ and my brain  involuntarily, and operating on its own rules of stimulus/response, took the word forever and prompted both the lyrics and the melody of the James Bond movie Goldfinger, with Sean Connery in 1964, “Diamonds are forever,” and played it. Not a song I would have chosen. This morning thinking the word morning caused a Joni Mitchell son to be pulled out, laid down and played.

The night of December 31st 1999 leading up to Y2K the radio counted down to reach its number one pick: Prince’s “1999.”  Twenty years later a song lay down and played from Greatest Hits of the 90’s and I burst into tears. Mind opened me up to a previous time, the lid to a box, the door to a room that I reasoned was over, done, sealed, and empty of any emotion. Was that merely temporary? I thought I couldn’t be hurt, that the wound had healed, but the song opened me up as if the pain were there inside alive, the tears and grief just as real, genuine and authentic as when they occurred twenty years ago. Instead of calloused hard and thick skin I was thin-skinned. Calcification hardens. Calcified means stuck, not porous. Mine was more like melted chocolate. Dig deep enough and the flashback cells played back, fresh and alive, indelible. I was shocked at how sudden, immediate, hot, and complete, as hurtful as ever. No holds barred. By heart.  Do reminiscence and nostalgia fool us? I rue the days I once vowed to remember.  They’re unwanted memories now. A mine sweeper? I need a mind sweeper.   Why? Well, in my family the men came home at night.

I’m reminded of another jukebox. It was Y2K and only bigwigs would be given priority seating to the promoted pizazz back in the District, as Washingtonians refer to Washington, D.C.  I was little people who would not be allowed close up front viewing, so instead of these fireworks and hoopla display I chose Harper Valley, W.VA., and Rachel (she was a native) recommended a restaurant named Dee’s. At Dee’s there was a miniature jukebox affixed to the back wall in each booth.  I wondered is the jukebox a form of entertainment placed there to keep you amused. To divert and distract you from the wait, your impatience?

Twenty years later, in a pique of outrage and anger at my stupidity for the profligate energy and affection I gave to men, I would trash the keepsakes of that time. My extravagance was wasted. Having dedicated too much to that man I married, I tossed souvenirs and tore down the shrine of that time.  I should not have scrimped and saved, I should have plunged and purged, cleansed and flushed.   Twenty years later the cues would signal to a different man with different milestones in a different city when I walked down streets reminiscent of him.  Oh, there’s the college he attended, the high rise where he lived. My keepsake was the key he gave me to clean his house.  “His house? He asked you to clean his house?” Yes. He doesn’t live there anymore. Imprinted after so many times I turn to look, my head swiveling anyway. Rote is learning without understanding.  How long to get over it?  “‘Til someone else comes along,”  Gregg Allman said. This man replaced that man.  Why? Sex blinds, sex binds.

Distraction? Memory can have the opposite effect.   Brain hones in on its object.

Elizabeth Wadsworth Ellis’s friend is the dictionary; the library, her tower. Publication is validation.