When memory comes calling

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/12/2023 (668 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At 7 a.m. in the dark of a December morning I was at the office, tearing the foil top off a small tub of yogurt.

A different yogurt than usual, bought only because it was on sale at Safeway, the cheapest yogurt choice out of dozens. With fibre and without. With lactose and without. As many different percentages of milk fat as I have fingers. Balkan. Greek. Icelandic Skyr. Fruit mixed in — fruit on the bottom.

No one else in the office yet when I had the first spoonful of my discount tub. It tasted slightly sour with a peculiar, almost grainy consistency. Familiar.

And then decades vanished.

I was standing in the kitchen in the house where I grew up in Halifax, the old fridge open, my spoon in a tub of my mother’s yogurt.

My mother was precisely five feet and one inch tall, a solid ball of unstoppable energy. She could shingle a house. Skin a rabbit. Butcher a pig. Canoe for hours. Scuba dive.

Most of all, she made decisions and stuck to them, intransigent. She was right — and, by the way, she was right.

One of her decisions was that store-bought yogurt cost too much.

So she made her own.

She made her yogurt in a piece of surplus equipment from her job at the time — which meant she had brought a piece of lab equipment, an incubator that had lost its handle, from Dalhousie University’s biology department.

With the biology department, it had incubated heaven knows what — in our house, with a white knight from an incomplete chess set screwed on to replace the handle, it was a yogurt maker.

Mom would make a batch of yogurt, then scoop out a spoonful to use as a starter for the next batch — which meant, sometimes, that things went down the yogurt rabbit hole and invented a whole new type, texture and flavour of yogurt. (You might call it a bad batch — but mom hated waste, so… )

Thing is, one of her legendary and challenging accidental versions was exactly the taste and texture I was encountering decades later in a Winnipeg newsroom, years after her death. I knew it instantly. Funky and off, but I wasn’t putting my spoon down.

And I could see her, with her resting mom face, lips pinched as they always were when she was concentrating, making yogurt, the microbial manufacturing machine with its door agape, waiting patiently to culture.

Anyone who has lost a parent knows how that feels.

Anyone who has lost both parents knows it even more.

Remembering is hard enough — it’s even harder when you find yourself reaching for the phone to tell a parent how you’d just had to smile about something they used to do, only to come to a juddering halt because there’s no one to tell.

Years go by and there’s no cure for that parental equivalent of phantom limb syndrome. They’re still there, but they also most certainly are not. All of that information and humour and skill and love, winked out and wasted.

You’d think that knowing that would be punishment enough, without your own brain’s ability to torment you by upending the memory toybox all over your office.

It’s amazing how your mind can mess with you — and how powerful and large it actually is. Able to store and recognize thousands of songs, to recognize smells and tastes and colours and geography, the human mind is an absolute wonder.

But why does it do this particular thing? What’s the value of whipping you out of the present and sending you back to a time you can’t even share with the other people who were there? What possible evolutionary gain is there in being transported back in time because of something as simple as a spoonful of yogurt, or a particular wet-weather smell in the air, or the way the light catches a dust mote hovering in the living room air?

How is it supposed to make us more adaptable or better able to survive?

I am at a loss. And also, once again, profoundly sad.

We had an op-ed piece in the paper earlier this week saying that, in Indigenous teachings, there are times of the year when the ancestors are closer to you, reaching out — and that this is one of those times.

I’d like to believe that’s true.

Now, leave me to my yogurt. These opportunities for travel don’t come along every day.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor for the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca