Music and the senses

Did you ever notice that when you smell something familiar, it can bring back a memory or flashback of something that has happened in your past? The sense of smell is the strongest out of all the sense and can instigate people to recall memories that occured even years prior. This what happened to me today, except the smell helped me to remember a certain song that I was listening to some time ago.

I was walking through Bloomingdales today and an older lady, probably in her mid 50s, walked past me. The smell of her perfume swarmed around me and I knew that that smell was seemingly familiar. After thinking about it for a series of minutes, I was finally able to recall why the smell was so familiar to me.

The image of being in the Beacon Theater in New York City instantly came into my head, once I was able to pinpoint what the smell reminded me of. The perfume that that woman was wearing was the same perfume as a woman I had met in NYC while at an Allman Brothers concert in the city. I was at the concert with a friend of mine, and we were by far the youngest people in the venue. The woman in front of us had taken special notice of myself and my friend (probably since we were a generation younger than everybody else) and had seemed so ecstatic that people in a generation younger than herself were still able to enjoy and appreciate her the music of her own generation. We had a profound musical conversation and found a majority of similarities between ourselves. It was clear that I had made an impact on her life, and she did on mine as well.

The senses really are an incredible thing and even have a link the the world of music. It's interesting how one smell can help me to recall such a specific image that occurred in my history. It makes me wonder if the perfume that I wear can perhaps have an effect on someone else, as the woman in the store did with me today.