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Showing posts from May 16, 2011

A Windy City Cocktail: Jack's Reunion

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We may not give much thought to it one way or the other--in fact, I’m pretty sure we don’t--but no matter what else we do, we’re constantly doing one thing: filing away memories, for later retrieval at some unspecified date.  Case in point? All we have to do is hear a song playing in a store, catch a few minutes of an old movie on TV, get a waft of a certain perfume while walking through a room, or read a name or phrase in a book... and suddenly, without even trying, we’re right back in the middle of whenever , reliving in our minds some episode--either momentous or inconsequential--from the past.  Good, bad, and boringly-mundane memories... our minds are like so many rows of filing cabinets in a huge warehouse, with vast storage space to hold all that stuff as we accumulate it with each passing day. But, we might ask, why do we have so many memories? Is their purpose, by turns, to titillate, amuse, anger, and/or embarrass us... or do we learn something valuable from them, as well? **