THIS AND THAT, BUT MOSTLY THAT.

Blog number 357 **** 07 January 2009

Peeling a temple orange, the smell made me think of Christmas back when I was seven or eight years old, eating my first tangerine. This remembrance made me think of other "first foods," which made me think of other things. That's the thing about memories. They work by association, not temporally. I remember when I first looked at my memories to see how they were connected and discovered they worked by association. I had been under the impression that they worked one after the other, earliest first. It seems odd to me now that I didn't know that before I knew it, but not long after that I found out a lot of other things about my thoughts that I never knew.

I digressed.

Again.

I used to have a haircut that got pretty rowdy when it got a little long because I have this tendency to play with my hair - running my hands through it, scratching, etc. You know the drill.

Then I got it cut short all around - almost like the cuts they give you when you first go to basic training in the military. Babies seemed to love it. But something rather strange happened.

My loving wife, said to me the other day, "I want you to go back to your old haircut because this one makes you look old."

Now, she didn't say, "It makes you look older." Nor did she say, "It makes you look too old." No, what she said was , "It makes you look old." I'm three months short of being seventy nine years old, which is one year short of being eighty. Of course I look old. I am old.

It's things like this that make me want to be able to get into other people's minds to see what they are thinking.

What was she thinking? Won't do any good to ask, because she won't know.