Soapy Memories

You know how sometimes the smallest seemingly most insignificant thing can unlock memories you even forgot were there? Well something like that happened to me today but not nearly on a scale as grand as I’ve laid out. It all started with soap.

First a little background. I don’t consider soap to be a high priority item, pretty much any soap will do. I prefer non-scented bar soap but I’ll use strawberry watermelon rainbow scented body wash if it performs it’s appointed task – getting me clean. I guess you could call me a soap slut – any soap will do. But just because I don’t have soap standards doesn’t mean I can’t have soap favorites and yesterday I got excited (excited is a bit strong – pleased) because my grocery store had the original Lever 2000. It hasn’t carried the original scent for years so I’ve been stuck with some annoying mildly scented version of Lever’s perfect original product. Now I could have gone somewhere else to get the soap I wanted but, like I said, I don’t really care.

Anyway I used it today and it was nice. It’s feels great to be clean and not really smell like anything. So to get back to the original point it made me remember how I started using Lever in the first place. It must have been back in middle school or late elementary school. My best friends’ family started using it. At home my dad and I used Irish Spring – blah. Sorry, Dad. Well, I just mentioned to my dad, in passing, that the Irish Spring made me sneeze. It was just conversation. I wasn’t complaining – just talking. He asked me if there was something else I liked and I just mentioned the only other bar soap I had been regularly exposed to – Lever 2000.

This in turn flooded me with memories of my childhood best friend and his family in addition to thoughts and feelings of my Dad and home life. Don’t worry I’m not going on a boring trip down memory lane. I just find memory cues interesting, how our brains manage to connect the most obscure things, how my brain went from soap to action figures in two seconds.