Proust

This morning on the train, I was sitting next to a man whose smell reminded me of an old boyfriend. Old, like more than 20 years ago. I can't quite put a finger on it, it wasn't a smell of cologne, and it wasn't body odor, and it may have been more in the clothes than on the person, but whatever it was, it provoked a sharp involuntary memory. The mind indeed works in curious ways. Many times a smell will conjure up some past experience, but sometimes doing something will do the same thing. Nearly everytime I decompress by doing a Sudoku puzzle in bed, I think of a woman I knew - an aquaintance really - and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what the association is. She died recently. Maybe it was that I was following the saga of her death in postings on the web, each night just before the bedtime Sudoku...? Who knows.