Two-Two-Tango. Never heard of it. But when I was a little kid there was Two-Eight-Tango.
Two-Eight-Tango was a Cessna 150 at Gibb’s Flight Service at Montgomery Field, San Diego. I think it was an old razorback. Its blue-on-white paint was showing it age. It was one of the older airplanes Gibb’s had. They called it ‘Shaky Jake’. Old ‘Shaky Jake’ crashed. (I searched Cessna 150 crashes in San Diego from 1966 to 1976 and found N6228T. Says it was a mid-air with a total of five fatalities.) I remember I was sad to hear ‘Shaky Jake’ crashed.
Whenever I hear the word ‘tango’ I think of ‘Shaky Jake’.
I’m not sure. My best memory-recovering method seems to be right before bed. It’s like I try to scan my brain for a piece of memory, like a toy flower my sister had when I was little, and then I try to build off of that piece by piece. Sometimes I reach a dead end but if I’m lucky it releases a burst of memories, like a chain reaction. I guess it’s kind of like how you mentioned.
Toy flower
Played house with the toy flower with my best friend Krista.
Worked with Krista and made a really cool book in the third grade.
Our third grade built a snowman, which was knocked down by the other third grade classes.
Sometimes when I use a blender (about a thousand times a day at my job) it triggers memories of a video game I played in high school called “Lords of Magic”, where the main villain was a demon called Balkoth. Usually the memory involved parts of his speech-track.
Scents are incredibly powerful for me. A couple weeks ago at work I kept getting these nagging thoughts of a place I worked at several years ago. I couldn’t get it off my mind; I was sitting at my desk googling my old employer just to see what would come up, and reminiscing pretty hardcore, even though I hated that job. Finally it dawned on me that the new soap in the bathroom was the same kind of soap they had at the old job.
Aspen cologne brings me instantly back to freshman year of high school. We drenched ourselves in it every morning before class in a (probably failed) effort to mask the smell of smoke.
Sometimes I’ll smell something that just reminds me of being really young - like too young to walk or talk. I’ll probably never figure that one out. Odd feeling, though.
I agree that scents are the strongest memory triggers for me.
Just today, I picked up a little crate of raspberries…I don’t even like them that much, but the smell - wow, took me back to being a little kid in the backyard and picking them for my mother. I am sure anybody walking by me in the aisle must have though I was a real whack job as I stood there sniffing the box.
Also the smell of lilacs - my grandmother’s backyard was full of lilac bushes and one whiff takes me right back to being a kid in her garden.