Mom died in May, so today was just a random memory. Subconsciously, I did hear her voice, so who knows? Memories are funny things the way they do a sudden total recall when a random neuron misfires.
I know someone in his early 40's who does not like his mother and is verbally abusive and non-supportive of her, even though he has a very high income. I know their background and have known them personally since he was a child. I also know he is very wrong in his treatment of his very decent mother. His father abandoned them and she raised the children alone. I think sharing was a gentle reminder to anyone who has forgotten their Mom, to remember her and that she will not be around forever. My mom had a hard life but I respect her more for making it through and giving us the love she did in spite of too many deprivations over the years.
It didn't blow up but Grandma would not go in the kitchen while it was working. The new versions with the steam pressure weight work perfectly. I don't blame people being afraid of the old ones with no pressure release and big screw-down clamps holding the lid on. That's a bomb in the making!
Sharing memories with total strangers is a way to remind me of who I was.
Can't blame Grandma, then. I think our pressure canner was more or less like what you described. This would have been in the late 70s, early 80s, so technology has improved quite a bit sense then. My wife cans occasionally. While we have our youngest and his family living with us for now, it is going to be mostly the two of us so creating a lot of anything probably isn't going to get eaten.
I don't know that I would say that there's a clear or direct purpose for everything, but I might call this more than just a random neuron misfire. If it's only meant for you and me, it still provided a moment of reflection, and those are too often discarded, overlooked, or drowned out.
We use our pressure cooker frequently for cooking kale and the process went from 45 minutes down to one minute! A real time saver. I love homemade, thick veggie soup and it saves half an hour on a two gallon batch. The little weighted pressure valve is virtually foolproof and causes no worries.
Our brains are almost mysterious in how they process data, maybe similar to quantum computing. However it uses input, and for whatever the intended purpose was, the neuron fired based on that processing result and here we are in discussion about memories! In a similar way, the idea was then exchanged beween us as tiny parts of overall human intelligence, acting as human-unit neurons.
Thought and memory are mysteries. Being able to recall such detail at random means that it has been stored for a very long time. Fascnating to think that everything could still be in there!
Meaning, they could be crowded out or overwritten? I'm no brain expert, but if it weren't for aging, new wiring being added, the ability to recall being pushed one way or the other, I bet we'd be able to remember much more than we typically do. My mother can remember things about my life that I don't. Why is that? At different stages in our lives we have access to different stages of our lives? Anyway, it is a fascinating topic.
Technology is awesome, when it works. It might take a while to get there, but I find myself wishing we had what we have now in my youth so I could be much better with it and what's coming next.
As a side note, I'm not sure if you remember the conversation we had on your yard art post, but I did mention you in a post I published yesterday because of that conversation. In case you're interested, you can find that post, and it's bottom reference to our conversation, by clicking here.
The fascinating part to memory for me is that there is so much there! Petabytes of the stuff we don't even know we have and can get only brief, accidental glimpses of. Nature was not kind to give us the memory but no way to access most of it.
Another theory of mine is that is what all of the "unused" part of the DNA code is for. Some day, something will trigger a mutation in someone and that will activate the "unused" part from the single 8088 CPU it is now to a Pentium II and we can draw on the other mental resources we are not capable of now. At least that's something to wish for.
I very often wish I had access to the Internet, YouTube instructional videos, and Khan Academy when I was a child. I could have learned so much more than with the resources (and support) I grew up with. Sadly, we don't get do-overs, though, no matter how nice it would have been.
And thank you for the mention and for remembering our conversation, too. Since you have the Tarbibs frozen in time and on display, I suppose the story must have been true. It just needed a little spark from a neuron!
Will