As Marcel Proust famously established in his Remembrance of Lost Time, smell and taste commonly trigger involuntary memories. For me, though, it is just as much, maybe more so, music that does that. When Debussy's "Claire De Lune" plays on my classical station, I see the dark blue cover of the sheet music propped on our family piano, my dad's long, freckled fingers on the yellowed keys, the pipe in his mouth. I credit my dad and his brother, a priest, for instilling in me my love of classical music.
It stuck with me even during my hippie years, so that when I hear Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony, I see myself entering the door of the apartment where I lived at the time in California, after having hitchhiked to the nearest record store to buy the recording as a treat for myself, though there wasn't much money left from my waitress job for things like that. Tragically, and yes it did feel tragic at the time, I had lit a cigarette and hastily set it down in what I thought was an ashtray to run out to the courtyard where my toddler had followed the departing babysitter. Instead of the ashtray, the burning cigarette had landed on my brand new lp and burned a depression into the vinyl before I could play it through once!
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