Last Week I Learned... HO Gauge and String Cheese

The holiday season often brings families together and brings back memories. However, two memories I wasn't expecting to come back were triggered in totally different ways. First, my kids and their cousins, aunts, and uncles visited a train exhibit in a local museum. I hadn't thought about it in years, but when seeing the displays I remembered the HO Gauge train set that me, my brother, and my cousin used to spend hours on - building the model houses, rearranging the tracks, and trying to see how complicated of a setup we could make with multiple trains going at once on shared and crossing tracks.

That was a more traditional memory trigger. I saw something in front of me and could immediately and vividly recall moments, objects, and people.

The less traditional one occurred while waitoing parked in front of a CVS pharmacy. Next to the store was the office of a tax accounting firm where one of the partners had the last name 'Magnifico.' I don't know why it happened, but it made me think about a commercial from the 1980's where some kids walked into a pizza shop and were saying italian-like phrases such as 'Bellissimo' and "Magnifique.' I couldn't remember what the commercial was so I googled 'pizza commercial bellissimo magnifique' and sure enough, the first result was a blog post about a 'Polly-O String Cheese' commercial. The exact one I was remembering. I don't know why of all commercials this one would have remnants lingering somewhere on my mind. I think my siblings and cousins used to reenact it. Or maybe it was friends in schools. I think I was the guy with glasses.