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.
