doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Teleporter moments

Spent yesterday driving across Kansas enroute to a family funeral. Sailing along at 75 I had one of those “trigger” moments that teleported me to an earlier time and in the process transformed the rest of the day. Off to the right and down a draw my eye caught glimpse of a gentleman, his dog and a double. His van was parked on the side of a gravel road and he was taking his first steps into the grass as his dog was already 20 yards upslope. The scene was like one of those live iPhone snapshots: a moment of movement and then freeze frame. For the next couple hundred miles as that scene played on a loop in my mind it was interspersed with memories of similar long ago scenes of my own populated by friends and dogs no longer with us.

I’ve experienced this before with just a whiff of wood smoke or a spoken phase. It’s pleasant. And powerful.

AND a cloud can do it !!!

I get what you are saying. I wish it was always pleasant. You described it well. Sorry for your loss.

Sometimes a tune or melody does that for me, transports me back to another time and that memory plays over and again for a bit before the present asserts itself. And it is powerful.

I had one of those moments yesterday. I was stalking through some palmetto and scrub with a Marlin lever 30–30. I came to a place where the ground cover was clear, and all I could see was white sand covered with all kinds of animal tracks. They call it sugar sand here in Florida. The sun was sitting low, casting a warm golden color on everything. I have a flashback to a day when I was about eight years old, and I was trapping through the woods with a Red Ryder BB gun, following the tracks of rabbits and squirrels in the snow. The memories came back so powerfully I could not believe it. About 30 minutes later I slipped up on some wild hogs, had one at 30 feet and another at 10 feet, but I could not get a shot at either. They were so fast, darting away like jackrabbits. My heart was sure racing. It was a fine day!

Smell can certainly do it as well.
Karl

The olfactory sense is the greatest of our senses of recall. Wood smoke, burnt gunpowder, your Dad's after shave, so many...
JR

This happened to my father about 20 years ago just a year before he died.

I went over to see him to see how he was, and noticed that both of his hands were blue and swollen. So I asked him what he had been doing.

He replied:" I was just driving out early to get the groceries. I was driving east as the sun came up, and suddenly there was a flash of sunlight, and I saw two Me-109s to my right. I grabbed the steering wheel so hard that I hurt my hands, mainly my thumbs trying to hit the Browning 50 cal triggers."

He flew 83 missions in B17s, mostly in 1943 over North Africa, which is why he survived I guess. He can be seen in the original "Memphis Belle" movie, after climbing out of the rear turret.

HB

Was this the 1990 Memphis Belle movie or an older documentary film with actual footage?

The aviators of the Greatest Generation are among my heroes. The airmen of the Mighty Eighth had 29,000 souls killed in their missions exceeding the number of Marines killed in the Pacific. Seventy-five percent of the airmen of the 8th never completed 25 missions because of losses. Towards war's end, their missions were important not just for the destruction of the German factories, but mostly to lure the Luftwaffe airborne so that they could be shot down by the Mustangs to the extent that D-Day could take place without an effective German air support. Mom's oldest brother was shot down in a B-25 over Wewak, Papua, New Guinea, on Oct. 16, 1943, reported by the Japanese to have been taken alive, but never came home after the war ended. Another Mitchell flew over Tom's plane and took a photo of the plane in the ocean after ditching with the crew swimming to rafts. I have a copy of the photo which appeared in a book written about his Bombardment Group. There are fewer than 119,000 WWII veterans alive today. If a GI was 17 and landed at Normandy in June of 1944, he would be 97 today. Your dad was truly an American hero and the world would be a different place today but for the likes of him and others of his generation. Gil