It isn't just sights and sounds that can evoke youthful memories

Your memory can be jogged in many ways.

We all know the reaction of hearing an old song that takes us back to an earlier time in our lives, and we're also aware of how much can be evoked by looking at pictures from when we were younger.

Just a few minutes ago, I looked at a picture of myself from 1997. I had a full head of hair and a beard in the photo and every hair visible was dark brown. No gray -- or even worse, white -- at all. By that age, my closest friend had already become a stockholder in Grecian Formula.

But for all we get from sight and sound, it's easy to overlook the way a smell can take us back. After all, most of the smells we experience in everyday life are a part of our present. There just aren't that many opportunities to smell the past as if it were the present.

But I had one today, and I swear it snapped me right back to the fall of 1967 as if it were yesterday.

The old McCormick Road dorms, UVa.

In September 1967 I was 17 going on 13, particularly in terms of social interactions with others my age. I had graduated from high school in June, and I made the wrong decision about where to go to college. Even if I didn't know it at the time.

I had had exactly four dates in high school, only one of which I drove for. Except for a taste or two of beer my grandfather had given me when I visited him in Ohio, I'm pretty sure alcohol had never crossed my lips.

I wanted desperately to be liked, which made it pretty certain I wouldn't be. I was one of those people who always tried too hard to get people to like me.

Anyway I was 17, with nothing even resembling social experience and I made the decision to go to a school that was pretty high-powered socially -- the University of Virginia.

I lasted three semesters, although by October of my second year I had pretty much stopped going to classes. I had learned to drink by then, although I was still more than a year and a different college away from having my first real girlfriend.

Bourbon whiskey

There has never been another place in my life that I have both loved and hated as much as Charlottesville, Va., although the negative feelings are really about what I allowed to happen to me while I was there. I failed completely as a student, but I impressed the members enough that I was accepted into the Jefferson Literary & Debating Society. At least I enjoyed my Friday nights.

But I have digressed too long. This was not intended to be a piece about my many shortcomings, but about smells being able to evoke memories from long ago. My time in Charlottesville was when I first discovered bourbon whiskey.

When I was unsophisticated, I drank mostly bourbon and coke, although later in my 20s and into my 30s, when I drank bourbon it was mostly from shot glasses. I liked Rebel Yell, but I was never that much of a drinker. I moved on to screwdrivers and ultimately Pina Coladas. For the last 10 years or so, I've been pretty much a two or three drinks a year sort of person.

But I do have a bottle of bourbon in my pantry, even though I have yet to drink any of it. I'm a big fan of Stuart Woods' books about Stone Barrington, the lawyer/detective who appreciates Knob Creek bourbon from Kentucky.

So I bought a bottle. It's a higher-class bourbon, something like $35 a fifth. Earlier today, I twisted the top, uncapped the bottle and just smelled it.

I swear to God, I practically swooned. All of a sudden, it was May 1968 and I was sitting in my dorm room at UVa.

Yes, even smells can bring back memories.