Memory is the strangest thing, but some of the things we remember ought to tell us to be very, very careful.

It's particularly true with television, which seems to hammer memories of totally trivial things deep into our subconscious mind. For example, I didn't even like the television show "The Brady Bunch," but I have no trouble remembering all the words to the theme song.

[caption id="attachment_272" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Unforgettable?"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/6a00d8345206dd69e200e5506ca0428833-800wi.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-272" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/6a00d8345206dd69e200e5506ca0428833-800wi-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>[/caption]

There's just no reason for that.

Nor is there any reason that when I'm listening to the Sixties channel on my Sirius/XM radio, I can remember the lyrics to almost every song I heard more than five times back then -- whether I liked it or not.

It's even true of the Seventies.

<em>"Indiana wants me, but I can't go back there ..."</em>

<em>"Everybody was kung-fu fighting ..."</em>

Yet almost every time I leave the house with two or three errands to run, I forget whatever it was I needed to take along for one of them. I suppose part of it might be the difference between short-term memory and long-term memory, but it <em>offends</em> me that I would have no trouble remembering the names of the members of the Jackson Five.

There are two people in the world other than myself whose Social Security numbers I know from memory, and one of them is someone I haven't seen for nearly 28 years. I remember the phone numbers of my two closest friends from high school, and that was more than 40 years ago.

My head is so full of <em>garbage</em> that it's a wonder I remember my own name sometimes.

I was answering a message from an old friend who said she didn't remember that she had met someone who was another friend of mine. I didn't remember exactly when we had met or what movie it was we all saw together, but I had a picture in my mind of the theater where we saw the movie.

Strange? I don't know anymore. I know I have absolutely no memory of the year I spent in fifth grade (1959-60), but I have some fairly vivid memories of third grade two years earlier. Go figure.

Of course, third grade was the first time I ever got trashed by a girl I liked.

Those memories <em>never</em> go away.