Of Course, A Horse
The human mind fascinates me. It has the ability to string together trains of thought in order to connect things that are seemingly completely unrelated and in no way similar. Due to external stimuli an innocent phrase can stimulate memories and senses that haven’t been thought about or experienced in decades.
Try walking back into your high school or another spot you spent a lot of time when you were younger. The memories that flood back are things you probably haven’t even though about since you were there. A billboard may remind you of a paper you wrote for English class that got hung up in praise, reminding you of the work and effort you put into it. A bank of lockers may remind you of a girl or guy you had a crush on and even though you can’t remember their last name you remember the color of their eyes and the way they wore their hair 20 years ago.
Those are ordinary, visual, connections. Today I sloshed some coffee out of my cup as I was retrieving it from the cup holder as I got out of the car. The scalding liquid splashed a little on my hand, burning me, and I muttered “of course” to myself in a woe-is-me belief that misfortune was coming for me and of course I burned myself on my coffee. My next thought was immediately, “no one can talk to a horse of course. That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mr. Ed.” This song was complete with the lyrics and melody and a faint memory of the black and white TV show intro that I used to watch when I was little on Nick at Nite but probably haven’t seen in 10 years.
I probably say ‘of course’, or hear it said, multiple times every day and it doesn’t trigger this memory. So what was so special about this one time that my mind formed this instant connection from a phrase muttered off-hand to myself to a TV show that was seemingly the furthest thing from my mind? I’ve got a couple of ideas. Earlier in the day I had cause to come up with a random word, and the word I chose was zebra. The horse on Mr. Ed was actually a zebra due to training issues with the original horse cast to play the role. This seems like a tenuous connection at best, but was the random phrase enough to bump Mr. Ed higher up in my consciousness in order to latch onto the “of course” I uttered later? Perhaps. Another possibility could be that horses were on my mind due to a mention of cavalry in battle in the audio book I was listening to that morning. They were actually faerie horses, but horses are horses after all. Perhaps that’s what bridged the connection.
I’m always fascinated by these “Where’d that come from?!” moments our brains toss our way. This one in particular had me smirking in amusement, and now I have the urge to watch an episode of a 1960s television show.