Free Association

No, I am not here to talk about organization you need to join.  Free association day will be things that immediately take me to something/someone else.  Like this:

peanut butter - jelly.  See what I mean?  But for me it is more specifically this:

Jif peanut butter - Welch's grape jelly

So here goes!

A&W - first off I would think of cold frosty glass mugs of root beer.  But then I would think of my 2 cats I had back in college that I named Alice and Wallace (A&W).  They were evil and bad cats.  E-vil like the fru-its of the dev-il as Mike Myers would say in So I Married an Axe Murderer.  Anyhoo, after I took them down and got them fixed, one of my co-workers came in and started laughing and told me that I should now call them "Eggless Alice and Ball-less Wallace".  Hahahahahaha!!  Now THAT was a hoot!

Oh, and by the by?  Alice and Wallace?  I gave them to my little paper girl.  I had my newspaper delivered by a little girl.  She was probably 10-12 and her dad drove her all around on her paper route.  She was the cutest thing.  The first time she came to collect I asked her how much I owed her and you won't believe what she said.

"Do you want the total with or without the tip included?"

Ha!  Now there is a clever child!  She used to stop in and play with the cats all the time and always told me how much she wanted them.  And finally one day, those 2 hell cats had torn up, chewed and ruined one too many things and had gotten on my last nerve.  So the next time she said she wanted them, I asked the dad if she could really have them and loaded up their food and litter and such and off they went.  I did miss them occasionally, but damn, they were destructive and needed something more than I was providing.  I know they were happier with the paper girl.  She brought over pictures of them getting to play outside and climb trees and such.

David Allan Coe - I think we can all agree that DAC is a freak.  But he had a very successful song that was out when I was in high school.  Go Here if you want to hear it.  When the first notes of this song start, I am immediately back at that time, drinking Lone Star beer in a longneck bottle, singing at the top of my lungs with all my friends.  This song was the Margaritaville for my high school years.  So,  freak or not, thank you to DAC for providing me with so many opportunities to sing my heart out!

Car Exhaust in Mexico - I know, this one is a bit weird.  But I just admitted to liking a David Allan Coe song and we know what a mysogenistic racist dick he is, so just go with me on this one.  There is something about crossing the border and walking around a plaza in a Mexican town with all the fun little shops and restaurants, bars and what-not, that is one of my favorite things to do.  And you can't experience walking the streets in Mexico without smelling the car exhaust.  I don't know why it smells different over there than it does here, but it does.  So that smell?  It reminds me of some of the most fun I have had.

Mariachi Music - See above.  You can't experience Mexico without mariachi music.  It's just not possible.  And it is quite possible that as the evening grows long and the tequila gets drunk, you magically know all the words and can sing along.  I have seen it happen.

Christmas Trees -  Seriously, this has to be one of the best memory triggers.  My birthday is in early December.  And every year we had to have the tree up and decorated before my birthday.  When I was little my mom thought all Christmas trees should be real and flocked, have only blue lights and all the decorations were blue and silver.  So I would always have my birthday party as a slumber party and we would all lay our sleeping bags around the tree and have the blue lights on and lay there and talk and giggle and do the things girls do at slumber parties, which is NEVER sleeping.  We were all best friends with our next door neighbors and during the same time period, their father died and my parents got divorced, so we were two moms and a passle of kids spending holidays together.  And since 2 of their kids were allergic to real trees, we got a fake tree so that we could all be together.  Fake trees have their place and they may look good, but they don't have that real tree smell, so it sure is a trade-off to have one.  The ecological side of me insists we keep our artificial tree and not chop down any more real trees, but the nostalgic side really misses the real tree.

Anyone have any free associations they want to share?  Lemme hear 'em!