So driving across town today I turn down the street my parents and I lived on until I was three. Years go by, and I don’t drive down this street, because its in a residential neighbourhood and I don’t really ever have NEED to go down it. Its only about 4 blocks long. I do remember the house but not much about living in it, my aunt and uncle bought the house from my parents so I spent time as a visitor to it for about 8 years after I lived there. Understand I was just barely 3 and a half when my parents moved.
As I’m driving down the street, on the radio I hear some familiar chords and realize its “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison. I turn it up, and suddenly
Wooosh! I am a very little girl, I am wearing a green and orange plaid skirt with a tshirt with a teddybear in the same plaid, sandals and Im driving in the front seat of my Dad’s car. (Some kind of large green Chevy, I can’t remember the exact model) I remember EVERYTHING about that moment, the scab on my knee, that we are driving home and my mom isn’t going to be home so we got KFC, and mostly that “MY Sweet Lord” came on the radio and Dad changed the station. (He hated the Beatles, the ex-Beatles, Wings, and all incarnations of anything to do with any of the Fab Four. Still does actually. So naturally, Im a fan.)
I could remember everything about that moment, but its not connected to anything.
Later this evening I was talking to my mother and asked if I had ever had an outfit like that, because I don’t remember seeing it in any pictures. She describes it as one she bought me in Florida (that would be in 1971) i got to wear it for about a month and then it got too cold, and I had outgrown it by the next year. I ask about her being away one evening that summer… would she have gone somewhere with a sister or something?
She tells me she was in hospital overnight after a miscarriage in the summer of 1971. I knew she had had one but not the exact year.
I would have been 22 or 23 months old at the time. It seems that hearing that song while driving down the street opened up a lost memory, and it seems imposssilbe to remember that far back. But I think I do…
Anyone else have songs trigger a “lost” memory?