I'm told that scientists have an explanation for why smells are so good at bringing a slice of the past alive. It is hard to not be carried to a different time and space by some smells you didn't even know existed. So it is, for me, with songs. It is probably because I have the habit of playing something endlessly if I like it. And I have been lucky enough to have done that over very long periods of time.

Long lone walks on the snow in Buffalo with a small playlist of favorites. Long hours at work with just one song playing all day. Very long lonely rides on a minivan everyday through traffic with the same songs playing on the radio… the list is endless….

The right smells are rare to come by. That probably adds to the magic. Songs, on the other hand, can be played anytime. I can call upon any one of them from my collection of portals to the past. But there's a problem here -these portals - they cannot be made to order instantly. They, like Andy Dufresne's rocks, need a lot of time and pressure. That's not the only problem though. Every time you play the song, every time you take the portal, you lose a bit of it. The next time, it doesn't exactly take you where it used to. It's as if someone slightly moved the telescope when you weren't watching. And when that happens enough number of times, it just stops being a portal. It is no longer a wormhole. Just a regular song like the rest.

So I try not to take the portals very often. I don’t want to disturb the orientation of my telescopes. I want all of them pointing at the right stars. Probably if I looked through them just rarely enough, they'll remain rightly oriented. Probably they'll bring up the same memories every . And more than anything, I hope that, as I try hard not lose any of the portals to the past, more are being forged for me to travel back to today… some day when nothing will be as it is now.