Do you remember that?
The games our memories play and why we remember what we do
I was shopping for Christmas gifts today in a Toronto game store – a store that sells old fashioned, physical, real-world games made of wood and paper, metal and plastic that you can pick up and hold in your hands, turning them over, feeling them out, deciding. It’s a sensuous experience.
Probably because touch is so important in deciding to buy one of these objects, the store clerk rigorously demands I sanitize my hands upon entry.
“I just did in my car,” I protest. I’ve been burned – literally – by homemade “hand sanitizer” on offer by many retail stores since the pandemic began. I prefer not to use their sanitizer.
He’s unimpressed. “But, you touched the door handle to come in.”
“I used the sleeve of my coat,” I insist. But, I’m lying. About the door handle and the hand sanitizer that sits in the driver’s door pocket of my car, as yet unused. He knows it. I demur.
Freshly sanitized, and hopeful my palms don’t turn scarlet and swell up to the size of my feet, I search for the most difficult metal puzzle in the store. My older son is a puzzle savant. There is no puzzle on Earth he can’t unwind, decipher, disconnect, open within 60 minutes. It’s a challenge to find something that will occupy him even that long. For the 1,000th time I think he should be a locksmith. He is not a locksmith.
Just before depositing my choices, all well-touched, turned, inspected and fondled by me and, presumably, dozens of other shoppers before me, onto the counter to pay for them, my eyes fall upon a display of cribbage boards. I pick up the simplest on offer, a straight, blonde, traditional wooden board with a coloured racetrack of peg-sized holes.
Why am I remembering this?
I turn the board over in my hands and memories immediately ignite inside my head like scenes of a movie projected poorly on a bedsheet hung against a tired, dingy wall.
I remember learning cribbage as a child from my grandfather. Or, was it my grandmother? No, grandpa for sure. And, I remember playing games of cribbage on a long train journey as a youth. I loved the game. It involved cards, a bit of math – but not too much – and the tactile sensation of pulling the pegs free from their holes, counting them forward and pushing them home, watching them advance down the board, around the corner and back again. I remember wanting to win before my opponent reached the skunk line.
But, who was my opponent on the train? I remember my grandpa. But, I don’t remember ever taking a train trip with him. So, it couldn’t be him. Who was it? When did I take a long trip? As a kindergarten-aged child, I remember travelling by train from Medicine Hat to Kamloops, B.C. with my mom and infant brother sharing a sleeper berth. I saw my first black man on that trip. He was the train porter who made up our seats as beds. So friendly, so helpful for a mother travelling alone with two kids: one freshly squeezed, the other (me) far too rudely inquisitive for my own good. But, that was years before I learned to play crib with my grandfather.
I travelled again by train as a teenager, with a high school friend, on our way from Kamloops to Vancouver to attend a science fiction convention. Yes, we were nerds. But, we were nerds on a “grown up” adventure. Probably about fourteen. I’d paid for the trip by working at the corner grocer. But, I don’t remember playing crib on that trip. And, my grandpa wasn’t there.
So, why does a cribbage board arouse memories of a trip I never took with my grandfather? Weird how that works.
Much of what I know about memory, I learned in a single 45-minute discussion with famed French psychologist Dr. Clotaire Rapaille who’d been hired by Canada Trust to advise on a new strategy to sell wills and estate services. I’d been so unimpressed at the prospect of spending an afternoon trapped in a boardroom with a dusty academic and half a dozen estates and trust managers, I’d made sure to bookend the meeting with others far more important, so I’d have an excuse to leave early.
When the time came to make my escape, I was gutted. Turns out, Rapaille is brilliant and, even more improbable, able to share his brilliance with others in his second language (or maybe third or fourth, who knows with these Europeans?) through compelling stories that I have since retold to dozens of friends and clients.
Rapaille talked about first experiences forming “imprints” in our memory. My first experience with cribbage was with my grandfather, so it was likely imprinted along a branch of my memory stemming from my first experience with him. Playing cribbage on a train trip was clearly also memorable and its imprint is immutably connected to my grandfather. But, why was it so memorable?
Wait! I remember there was another person of interest on that train. A girl. She was older and travelling alone. I remember being very smitten with her, as was my high school chum. At one point, as darkness fell in the coastal mountains of British Columbia, I managed to separate her from my chum. She and I shared time that night, alone in the observation car. I was a virginal adolescent and it was exciting to be alone in the dark with a young woman. She asked me to rub her legs, which were sore apparently. I was thrilled.
Nothing else happened. My buddy tracked us down and joined us. But the potential of the night, at least in my imagination, was profound. And a first for me. As I think about it, I believe she and I played cribbage in the morning. That must be it. And the cribbage would connect my pre-sexual excitement with my elderly grandfather. How gross.
I’m sure Dr. Rapaille would have more to say about my recollection. He’s done experiments to connect American’s pre-adolescent memories of coffee, its scent and smell with their infant sensations of love, warmth, security and family to help Folgers sell coffee. For decades, following his advice, they marketed the smell of their coffee in heart-warming ads featuring families and love.
If you want to learn more about Rapaille’s work and how it can help you understand how people remember things and why that’s important if you want them to do things for you, like buy your cars, toilet paper or coffee, you don’t have to meet him and a bunch of dusty estate bankers. Most of what he enthralled me with that day in 1996, he’s written in his 2006 book: The Culture Code which you can buy and read at your leisure. I’m reading it now and highly recommend it.
While you’re enjoying the rest of your day, I’m going to wash my hands one more time. Cribbage. Grandpa. Lust. Gross.
What weird memory connections have you had recently?