Memories through Music - A Personal Tradition

Memory can be a fickle thing.  But sometimes a certain smell, taste, or sound stops you in your tracks.  It suddenly brings you back to a specific moment in time.  Perhaps you associated that smell to a positive, vivid memory.  Tonight I watched a wonderful video about an elderly man in a nursing home who seemed so disconnected from the world, but then when someone placed headphones over his ears and played a song from "his era," his face lit up and he'd hum along.  The video, to which I've provided a link at the bottom of this post, reminds me how much music is associated with our memories.  Sometimes those memories are best brought back through the pleasant sounds we love. Music just seems to be inherent in our souls - it's easy to remember the lyrics and melody of a song - much easier than it is to recite words from a textbook.

I suppose I realized how important music was to me during my senior year of college when my best friend Marcus and I decided to put together a two-CD compilation of songs that meant something to us during our college years together.  And just this past October, during our ten-year college reunion, Marcus and I created a new nostalgic mix of songs.  It's a beautiful thing because each of the songs represent a shared memory.

At the tail end of my first year as a graduate assistant resident director from 2001-2002 at Capital University - a university with a respected Conservatory of Music - it seemed appropriate to consider how I could best "scrapbook" all of the memories with my first Resident Assistant staff (the Cotterman Crew, as we called ourselves).  In Residence Life, your staff can feel very much like a family, and I generally have very positive memories of that first staff!

I asked our Cotterman Crew to reflect on two questions: "If you could think of any song that would best describe your personality, what would it be and why?" and "From 2001-2002, what song has really stuck out in your mind and why?"  Their responses (including mine) were written into copies of a small pamphlet, and the song choices were recorded to CDs.  Everyone on the staff got copies. It was a way to take a snapshot of an entire year, and when listening to the music, it brings back the emotional landscapes of that year - good and bad.  I still have connections to a couple of my RAs from that year, for which I'm very grateful (maybe they'll remember the photo on the CD, when we all went out for dinner as a staff... and before I started sporting a beard!).

With the exception of only one year, I've continued this tradition with every staff I've supervised.  Two universities later and in my eleventh (!) year as a resident director, I'm about to do this again.  The memoir books have become more intricate and snazzy, and the reflection questions are occasionally changed, but the music is still recorded to CD (and in all likelihood copied to everyone's iPods).  I've kept every memoir book, and I've saved every song in my iTunes library.  Whenever I want to relive memories of a certain year with a special staff (they're all special), I can easily do so.
  
Music really is an expression of the human soul and memory.

"Old Man in Nursing Home Reacts to Hearing Music From His Era"