Flashback...

Our brains can be such a wonder at times. On Monday, I drove home in the early hours of the evening during a brief respite of the downpour which has engulfed San Diego this week. As I cracked my window slightly, letting a current of frigid air, scrubbed cleaned by hours of rain, into the car cabin, I caught the scent of exhaust of the two city buses in the lane ahead of me. The memory the smell triggered hit me almost like a physical force, throwing me back in time over a decade, to a time I spent most of my weekends traveling in a caravan of such buses from school to school all over Southern California.

I could vividly recall the sound of large diesel engines idling and the cacophony of hundreds of voices, some urgent, some casually preparing for the coming performance. My skin itched from the stiff pressed polyester of the uniform and prickled where exposed to the brisk autumn night air. In the distance, the muted staccato notes of a drumline could be heard warming up. And through everything, that smell. The smell of exhaust and fuel of dozens of internal combustion engines mingling in the air.

And as fast as it came, it left, fading like a person walking into a thick fog who's hard edges were quickly diffusing into the white background. I hadn't thought about that time in years but for that brief second, it might as well have been yesterday.