Judging by my social media feeds, it seems I’m not alone in bumping against reminders of sunnier times. For many, the yardwork and home improvement projects have given way to deep cleaning. The forgotten treasures of scrapbooks and photo albums have been unearthed and shared. Class photos, first cars, first crushes. Nostalgia, to borrow Dave Chapelle’s line, is a hell of a drug.

The photo above is of my mother and I, from the spring of 1976. Probably Easter Sunday. Breakfast at my late grandparents’ house, judging by the sprinkler and white siding. Grandpa was forever watering his lawn. No doubt a byproduct of his being an avid golfer.

The photo resides on the second page of a bulging album my sister assembled for me several years ago. The album sits atop a bookshelf in our computer room, always in view, seldom paged through. My other keepsakes are stored in plastic bins in a closet. I haven’t gone rummaging. That’s not what this post is about.

Rather, I want to discuss the power of spontaneous nostalgia, so often triggered by the scents and sounds we stumble upon. For me, they’re among the most powerful emotional triggers we humans experience, for better or worse.

And I must begin with something beautiful: Final Fantasy VII Remake.

A Prelude to Gaming Memories

I want you to listen to the following video. That it’s from a video game soundtrack is irrelevant. Close your eyes and let the emotion of the piece wash over you.

 

That’s “The Prelude”, a piece of music as famous to older gamers as anything by Bach or Chopin. Specifically, that’s the updated version of the song featured in the recent remake of Final Fantasy VII, one of the most famous PlayStation games of all time. A game that I, back in 1998, sank over 70 hours into.

I haven’t yet played the remake – and this post isn’t about video games, so don’t worry – but I’ve bumped into this song quite a lot lately, and every time I do it transports me back to our townhome in  North Carolina, before I worked in gaming. Final Fantasy VII was unlike anything that had come before it. The 3D graphics, for the time, were so lifelike and the characters so rich that, even today, millions of gamers can point to a particular scene as having caused them to cry for the first time while playing a game. That’s what I remember. Not the gameplay.

The theme songs from Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda are undoubtedly even more popular. I for one can’t hear either of those songs, especially their chiptune versions, and not flash back to my tween-age years. The title theme from the Shenmue trilogy hits me even harder. For others, it’s the Halo theme.

Music isn’t the first thing we think of when recalling our favorite games, movies, or television shows, but who among us doesn’t feel that familiar pang upon hearing a theme song from a beloved sitcom? But whereas I’ll seldom remember a particular tv episode or boss battle from a game, it takes only a few notes from one of those songs to remind me how I felt interacting with it.

It’s that power of how we felt in those moments I want to draw attention to.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re a fan of classical music and want to be blown away by the beauty of video game themes, check out this playlist.

The Nose is a Time Machine

The first time I walked into my local CrossFit gym, I was immediately transported to my childhood, to a gymnastics studio my mom had taken each of us kids to when we had extra energy to burn. The combined scents of chalk and rubber mats now usher me back to that memory four days a week. And from that memory, a yellow and blue striped clown costume I wore to the recital.

Every year, when the Christmas decorations are being unboxed and spread out just so, when the right candles are at the right spacing, and the packaging hasn’t been put away just yet, I’ll catch a whiff of the past. To the smell of holiday spice and pine and aging cardboard that so perfectly mimics the scent of the crawlspace where we stored heaping mounds of decorations in my childhood.

October walks in the forest, on trails of crunching leaves lined with thickets of shriveling blackberry, return me to those early winter hunting trips I took with my dad.

The smell of tatami mats will forever remind me of my first trip to Japan, then those five magical weeks Kristin and I spent chasing the cherry blossoms as we mourned the loss of her father.

The scent of Market Spice Tea from the famed Pike Place Market doesn’t remind me of my early trips to Washington, but rather the massive care package my Seattle-based aunt had sent to me in 1993. Nearly a decade before I ever traveled west of the Delaware River.

I can go on and on. The sight of a boardwalk, the cawing of seagulls, the smell of saltwater taffy. Oh, how the memories came back upon seeing the Asbury Park pavilion in The Sopranos, to the hunting and fishing expos I’d attended there with my dad – and the shark tooth he once bought me.

It’s How We Feel That Matters

Kristin was finishing reading Tai-Pan by James Clavell the other day. She was describing what was going on in the story and, despite considering the book one of my all-time favorites, I realized that I could scarcely recall a single character’s name. I only vaguely remembered a few plot details. What I remembered most was how I felt reading it. That I was awestruck by the interwoven storylines, the richness of the setting, the author’s mastery of the craft.

I have friends who can remember the characters and plotlines of stories and movies they experienced decades ago. That’s not how my memory works, or at least not what I attach to art.

Take, for example, the first book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger. I read the book several times as a teen and during my twenties. There are some vague plot aspects I can remember, but no more than three character names. Instead, I recall how reading it made me feel. The book’s opening sentence is magical: “The man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”

I see those words and I’m transported to my teenage self, falling in love with fiction all over again. That line reminds of how I dreamt of becoming a writer, hoping one day I could write like Stephen King.

I’ve long since given up on the hope of writing like Stephen King … or Jane Austen or Kurt Vonnegut. Rather my goal is to not-so-simply create a story readers will remember. Not necessarily for the originality of the plot or the liveliness of the characters (though that would be nice, too), but rather for how it made them feel.

When writing, I try to impart the memories I mentioned above, and the scents and sounds that trigger them into my story. Whether by lending my personal reflections to my characters or by inventing new ones whole cloth.

I do this to add depth to the story, to add texture to the setting and make the characters more lifelike, of course, but there’s more to it than that.

It’s because I love how it feels when a book reminds me of a particular memory, for better or worse. I want this for you, my readers. Hopefully, by instilling enough of these memory-triggering scents and recollections, you’ll not only be transported to happy memories of your own, but create new ones in the process. And then recall fondly how one of my own books made you feel, even if you can’t remember the main character’s name. Or what the story was about.

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