Of Madeleines and Music

Memories are not like lost car keys. To find cars keys, we have to force ourselves, usually by retracing our steps to track them down. Memories, especially distant ones, are found usually by accident, a chance encounter.  A passing scent, a brief taste, or a few notes of music can unleash a torrent of long-forgotten faces and events.

Artists, poets, and writers have been fascinated with memories for eons.  Neuroscientists, aren't, at least not in the same way as artists. They can tell us exactly where we store memories in our brain—they just can't tell us how we stumble upon a box of memories stashed under the stairs or crammed onto the top closet shelf of our mind with only the slightest prompt. (I've never much cared for neuroscientists.  They take all the fun out of stuff. Like those smarty-pants types who feel compelled to tell you the ending to The Sixth Sense before you've seen it.)

Marcel Proust had a lot to say about memories and their triggers in his work, Remembrance of Things Past. What set him off on his six-volume examination of the subject happened one day when he was having a cup of tea with his mother with which she included a little something, something he had seen in shop windows countless times but never given it a thought. But, once it "touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place."  He had tasted a madeleine, a little scallop-shaped cake. 

"And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine."

With me, music triggers equally as strong memories. Almost are delightful and are of people long gone—Billie Holiday sings and I'm back sitting with my father on the porch on a warm summer's night; listen to Strunz and Farah and I'm with my wife lying on the bald rock in front of the cottage at Nipissing looking at the stars during one of those rare times when our two-year old was asleep.   A few, though, are just bizarre. 

Yesterday I listened to Trick of the Tail by Genesis, an album I hadn't heard front to back for decades.  And as it played, I recalled someone from nearly 40 years ago.  His name was Peter and he was the worst scoundrel I have ever met.

We met at Calgary airport in 1976, which at that time a cluster of ATCO trailers surrounding a dinky terminal.  I was tagging along with my crush Mary Liz (pre-wife) to Banff, having dropped out of the geology and Earth Sciences programme at Waterloo to live in the mountains for a few years. While Mary Liz and me were waiting for the Brewster Bus to Banff, we spotted Peter, a handsome young man (we were 20, he was about 26) in the parking, lot frantically emptying his bags, pockets, and wallet onto the hood of his Bavarian; mentally retracing his steps, he soon realized he had left his keys in Montreal and his spare was in Banff.  Not thrilled of the prospect of riding the bus, Peter asked if we would split the cost of a one-way rental car.  In return, he let us stay with him until we got established.  Fortunately, he lived above the Avis car rental place and occupied the whole top floor of the house.  A virtual mansion for Banff. 

Over the next few weeks we got to know Peter.  He was nice, funny, and always generous with his liquor. Quite often, though, he'd ask us in the morning to not come home until around 8 or 9 in the evening as he was "entertaining" a woman.  He must have been good at it because there was always a stream of them coming and going. 

One day, when passing by his bedroom I noticed the handle of a substantial knife poking out from under his pillow.  Worried for our safety I asked him why he felt the need to keep a large knife on his bed.  He said it was for protection.  When asked, "protection from what?" he said, "from husbands."  You see Peter had a penchant for boinking Banff's married women.  Only married women.  He also said, with no shame whatsoever, that he made sure to lie next to the wall so he'd be behind the woman he was bedding in case an enraged husband burst in with a gun—he believed her body would stop any bullets directed his way.  When I told Mary Liz this, she looked at me with that look and said, "We leaving. Now." 

We didn't see much of Peter after that.  He never did get shot or have to stab anyone, and about six months later he, and his knife, went to Whistler.  He had simply run out of unboinked married women and went off in search of a new crop.  Fortunately, he gave us his apartment, which, for our visitors, was the easiest to find in town—we told them simply ask a woman wearing a wedding ring.