A Traffic Jam on Memory Lane

Tea: Mixed Berry Green

Music: Crimson Jazz Trio, "Three of a Perfect Pair"

Time: Night.

I'm sure it's not an original thought. But for years, I've repeated that the price of a good memory is a lot of bad memories. I don't mean that in the transaction sense. I mean that being able to remember lots of things in great detail has its downside.

I have perfect recall of my father pouncing on a giant cutthroat trout that I took out of Fish Creek in Montana, keeping it from flopping back into the water after it landed on the bank and threw the hook. I also can't erase the image of him pale and groggy in Intensive Care, waiting for open-heart surgery that failed to save his life.

I remember with utter clarity my mother waking me up just before midnight on Friday nights, starting when I was eight, so we could watch old horror movies on a tiny black-and-white television that she brought into my room. And I can't forget trying to make it through the school days, in December of my senior year, knowing she had gone into the hospital for the last time.

I don't have a choice. Everything's filed away in my head. But I do have a choice as to what I take out, dust off and revisit.

I can choose to recall being wiped out, overwhelmed and cranky when I arrived in New York for the first time -- or being revived by a huge, rich, comforting plate of oxtails.

I can make myself flinch, recalling the time I accidentally shut one grandmother's hand in our car door -- or think of the times we picked Concord grapes in her back yard.

I can keep ledgers of wrongs done to me, and scan the pages every day, or focus on the good things -- the better than I deserved things -- others said to me, gave to me, did for me.

Things will come up unbidden, as memories do. And it serves no good to pretend that things didn't happen. But I have a choice as to what I let linger.

Cup XLV: Smoke in the Water

Tea: Lapsang Formosa Alligator

Music: Daylight's for the Birds, "Worlds Away"

Time: Morning(s)/night

It's the rarest of posts for this tea-infused rambler. That's right -- it's about tea.

Scents and tastes take us back to where we've been. I smell rain and diesel together, and I don't care what my eyes and ears say -- I'm in London and it's 1986, about to turn to 1987. Lilacs and honeysuckle put me in the back garden of my childhood home. No matter where I taste it, a gyros sandwich reminds me of Missoula, Montana (that's where my sister once lived, and we were visiting her when I first tried it).

Man. Now I want a gyros.

Anyway ... all of the above, I understand. Scent (upon which taste depends) is the sense of memory.

But the smell and taste of this tea put me somewhere I haven't been before -- at least, not that I can remember. One taste and it's morning, autumn, in a pine forest. Someone has gotten up to make the fire, and the smoke hangs in the cool air.

I have no easy explanation for the phenomenon. That doesn't mean there isn't one. But ten hours after the last steeping, the whole experience remains vivid as memory, (un)familiar as a dream ... and the tea is gone now.

Tonight's story:

Ada Trevanion, "A Ghost Story"

Cup XXV: Swimming in a Pool of Memory, Walking the Floors of a Stranger's House

Tea: Arctic Storm, ginger and Sichuan peppercorn added

Music: Poe, "Haunted," on the player; Piano piece from "House With Pool," looping in my head

Time: (now) Night; (then) Several days in 2005

Occasionally, most often around the shift from summer into fall, I get a bit disconnected from present time and place. Not to where I can't function, mind you. It's more of a foggy, half-dreamy ab/distraction.

Today, the weather turned cooler -- and that, coupled with my slight addledness from my allergies and the medications I'm taking for them, created the ideal conditions for such a state.

The disconnects always come accompanied by music, vivid in my mind's ear. Tonight, it's the piano piece from "House With Pool," the looped video piece by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler that played two years ago at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

I would sit in the broken dark, watching the film repeat seamlessly for hours. The piano piece appeared (sounded?) twice -- once abortively, once through to a climax auditory, visual and emotional. And each time, it was both new and familiar -- never got old, never seemed that I hadn't heard it before.

But as far as I know, there's no soundtrack to purchase. I'll never own this music. Instead, it owns me, in a way. I can't hear it, even internally, without feeling a pull -- tenuous and steel-strong as spider's silk -- to ... what? The past? Some memory I don't know I have? Something ahead, still?

Maybe it's all interconnected. Maybe it's just a matter of breathing and letting the memories/impulses tug me along to where I'm supposed to be at the moment.

Or maybe it's just the decongestant ...

Tonight's haunting story:

Elia W. Peattie, "The Piano Next Door"