Chocolate Milk Memory

What is there about the human brain that can relive an event from many years ago, being triggered by just a taste or a smell?


Today I took a small drink of chocolate milk and was transported to the fall of 1962. Not only that, but I was suddenly in Bluefield, West Virginia at Fairview Junior High School. That’s a rather long distance from Northeast Florida, but it was very real in my mind. No, it was not a vision, nor was it anything that most people do not experience from time to time. It was just a taste of chocolate milk - store bought - and a wonderful memory returned.

We lived on a small farm in Bluefield and usually had a few cows, so milk was abundantly available at the Jewell house. It was that good kind that really gave you a white mustache because of all the butterfat content that is lost when it is processed. But chocolate milk had to be purchased at the store, and it was never on the grocery list. When I had it, it was a special treat. Mother sometimes made hot cocoa in the winter, but, as good as it was, it was not quite the same.

Why at Fairview, you may wonder? Well, I guess I do too, because I have no idea who provided chocolate milk for the football team after the games. It’s funny, though, I have no recollection of any actual football games. I was a benchwarmer. I remember a couple of times being on the bus, especially how quiet it was all the way home when we lost. But I knew there was going to be chocolate milk and chicken salad sandwiches when we returned to the school.

Oh, by the way, we raised chickens on the farm, too, and fried chicken was always on the menu, but I never remember Mother making chicken salad. So a good chicken salad sandwich can mess with my mind in the same way and bring back thoughts of my Junior High days.

My memory is always the same, however. With that one small taste today, I shivered, remembering a cold, damp, rainy night, just outside the back door of the gym, a chicken salad sandwich in one hand and that smooth, rich, chocolate milk in the other. Did we win or lose that night? It doesn’t matter. But someone made me feel really special as a football player for the Fairview Falcons.

I could drink chocolate milk every day if I wanted to, but I just save it for special occasions when I want to feel young again.