1:40 a.m. Tonight, we have leftovers. I love leftovers. I can live on leftovers.

To commemorate, I will bring out all sorts of metaphorical leftovers. Like this picture, which I took in July, but can't find a proper entry for. It's left over from a time when you would pull into a gas station and -- I'm not making this up, kids -- a bunch of men wearing little red jackets and clever caps would run up to your car and take care of things.

It was called "service," and you could get it at a "service station." Get it? Sometimes, to make their point, they would wear white gloves. Actually, there were a lot of people wearing white gloves not very long ago. And hats. I wore a hat called a "snood" when I went on my first honeymoon, to the Pocono Mountains.

It's an old World War II term for a head covering, probably from the British, likely stolen from the Raj. Now, of course, snoods are fuzzy creatures in a computer game that only exist to eat your leftover time.

I used to have quite a few pairs of gloves, and I don't mean the ones you wear for warmth. I mean white gloves that you wore to show off your hands and to think you looked good. I once had a strange, older-man-type boyfriend when I was in high school and he gave me a pair of doeskin gloves as a graduation present. They were slick and they smelled funny and it wasn't long after that that I was using manicure scissors to cut his picture out of the group shots and prom memorabilia.

I happened to be on my way to Easter services another year a few years later, wearing white gloves, of course, when we passed the brand-new ruins of the Champale factory brewing chimney, which had just been torn down in Trenton, NJ. There were, free for the taking, as many used bricks as you could grab and pile into your vehicle.

We were new homeowners, and if you've ever renovated a house, you might know the thrill of the hunt and the exquisite look of perfectly wonderful, ultra-expensive used red bricks. I wore red-dust-rimmed holes into every fingertip of those gloves before we even went home with our first trunkload and changed into work clothes.

I don't think I have ever worn girly white gloves since then. We built a circular patio with the bricks in our old back yard, and every time it rained, the pungent smell of baking hops would rise up out of the red clay, reviving the memory of the dusty factory corner that Easter Sunday morning, a peacetime bombsight heaped with smashed-brick rubble hillocks next to the muddy Delaware River.

You could say that memories are nothing more than leftover thoughts, and you wouldn't be far off.

It depends, of course, on how carefully you preserve them. Photos, old paper journals -- you open up your scrapbook or your shoebox of treasures and you can live forever on the succulent bits and pieces of a former life.

I remember that dress, for instance. I'm the professional cutie on the left in the picture on the right. The glum girl leaning on the gas pump beside me is Miss Plaid Stamp, and she was finished being nice for the day, thank you very much.

We were there at the Grand Opening of a brand new Humble Service Station in Bound Brook, NJ. Bound Brook was the city that just recently had severe flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd -- or was it Irene -- when the Raritan river ceased to be bound. Humble was a type of Esso station franchise, and the number "37" that you see over my shoulder -- well that, young readers ... that was the price of gas.

This would be 1968. My husband at the time was slogging it out in Vietnam. His brother-in-law was opening his first gas station. I was wearing a very short stretchy dress and my job was to wash car windows for the day. I was also a Republican.

I think that last fact might be obvious from the stupid hat, so I might as well confess now. I voted for Nixon. If you were traveling through Bound Brook on your way to Woodstock, I might have washed your windows.

My memory balks at the thought that I was actually hired to lean over. If I didn't have this picture, I wouldn't remember this tidbit. I threw the dress away the second I got home. The zipper down the front bunched up funny and when I raised my arm to hold on to my styrofoam hat, well -- no need to describe the rest of it.

If you don't want your memories going bad on you, you might want to invest in a pair of quality manicure scissors before you get too far along in the ancient history project that is your life.