This morning riding in to work listening to music, the illuminating analogy came to mind that the emotion state (which was incidentally being induced by John Hartford's Mark Twang) that flavors the feeling was a combination of several memories acting simultaneously. This particular piece of music (for me) invokes the feeling I might have riding a steamboat on a sultry southern afternoon. But because I first encountered this album when I was working with a high-performance and dynamic team of people I loved, those real memories are cast in along with the imaginary. And the imaginary, itself, is fabricated from real memories of my grandpa (who was an Arkansas Ozark denizen who lived in the "Bluegrass Capitol of the World" and close enough to the Mississippi but also matching the quaintness of the lyrics and bluegrass fiddle). A virtual "feel-good" gumbo.
It's the unique mix of those feelings in that moment, and the moment itself, riding to work at zero dark-thirty, that was the recipe for that feeling. The unique oleo, unique to me and unique in that moment, made me think very much of how each meal is unique in the combination of ingredients, the relative amounts and strengths of the seasoning, the meat and potatoes (also different from cut to cut and batch to batch . . ). Lucky thing, I should think, because it keeps things interesting.
