Most of the things that happen to us in a lifetime don’t stick around as memories.
Of all the events — both big and small — that make up a life, what’s so special about the ones that we end up remembering?
For example, I have a very specific memory of attending the local beach with my parents as a kid. We went to that beach many times over the years, but only that one memory has managed to stay in my head. Why is that?
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And then there are specific sounds, sights or smells that are so strongly associated with a particular memory that they never fail to conjure up that particular place or time.
I can’t listen to Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown without immediately remembering driving in our car with my dad on the Perkins Street hill in my hometown. Similarly, Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue takes me back to an afternoon more than 50 years ago when my dad brought me to work with him one weekend afternoon while he painted a hallway wall at the junior high school.
I have listened to both those songs countless times over the years in countless settings. Why do those particular places always spring to mind when the songs start? It’s a mystery.
A similar thing happened earlier this summer while visiting a garden centre and gift shop just outside Saskatoon.
There in front of me stood one of those coin-operated horse rides that used to be everywhere when I was a kid, and immediately I was back in the OK Economy in Estevan, Sask., circa 1970.
One of those rides sat just inside the front doors, and my constant clamouring for Mom and Dad to cough up the quarter was an early introduction to the saying, “money doesn’t grow on trees, you know.”
So now was my big chance, but in the end I didn’t take it. After all, the price had gone up to a dollar.
“Does it look like I’m made of money?”
