As “Mad Men” fans await the series finale Sunday, I’ve reflected on seven seasons’ worth of powerful moments. After the dust has settled following the final episode, I’ll have more to say about a lightning-bolt moment for me in “Severance,” the eighth episode of Season 7, but today I wanted to flash back to a scene from the 10th episode, “The Forecast.”
After taking Sally and her friends to dinner, Don drops them off at the Greyhound bus station. As soon as the images in this screen shot appeared on my TV, I was floored by immediately being able to smell the scene, diesel fuel and all. This was unexpected, and it derailed my seamless viewing of the show so much that I had to play back everything from that scene forward once I regained my sense of the present. In that moment, I’d been transported back to every Greyhound bus I’d ever ridden on, and every bus station, in some sort of visually provoked compressed composite memory. Or did one particular bus ride or depot become exhumed, rushing to the fore from some deep trench in my mind’s archives because of that visual stimulation? I didn’t know.
Later, I thought of Marcel Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu,” better known in America as “Remembrance of Things Past,” or “In Search of Lost Time,” which is a closer translation of the French title. The narrator describes in detail how a taste or a smell can trigger memories, although it’s far more complex than that.
He explains that only the power of memory can help him to reconstruct his personality, and goes on to develop a theory of two types of memory, the voluntary memory that we use in everyday life and a more powerful, involuntary memory that functions unexpectedly, triggered by a sound, smell, or taste.
Source: Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu) – Modernism Lab Essays
That wasn’t what happened to me. Instead, a memory — or several, and a smell, or some combination of those — was triggered by sight.
Anyone who’s heard of sensory marketing knows I’m not the first person to experience this, and you probably have experienced it yourself, but this was so unexpected, and so convincingly real, it stayed with me with such tenacity for enough days that I knew I’d eventually write about it.
In high school, we rode Greyhound buses to distant football playoff games. In college, a friend and I took a Greyhound to the Independence Bowl game between McNeese State and Southern Mississippi. The first Super Bowl I attended, I rode a Greyhound with my father to and from the game. As we waited in the station for the trip home, I was fascinated by the row of connected chairs with small televisions attached, my first experience with pay-per-view. I pleaded with my dad to give me some quarters so I could watch, and to this day I can’t recall what I saw on that tiny, black-and-white TV. It was another special moment on a fun, exciting day, one I’d been waiting for since my dad told me he’d been given two Super Bowl tickets. I’d been the envy of my classmates, and I was thrilled that I’d get to attend the biggest game of the pro football season, but in looking back, the best part of the experience was spending the day with my dad. Having lived more of my life without him in it than with him, I’ve come to appreciate that day even more.
There were stops at Greyhound bus stations on many trips. There were times when we picked up my grandmother at the station when she’d come for a visit, and we’d drop her off for her ride back home. There was a time when a family friend came to town to start college, and we met her at the station and brought her to her dorm. There was the night when my sister came in by bus for the weekend to be with my father as he was dying of lung cancer, and I dropped her off to be with him and my mother at the hospital on that Friday night before I went home to sleep. Soon after I went to bed, someone came to the house to wake me and tell me that he had died just after 1 a.m.
Which Greyhound bus station did I smell when I saw that “Mad Men” scene? Was it that one? Was it a memory compilation of all of the stations connected in some way to my father?
Where does a smell take us? Where does a memory take us? There’s no easy answer, but I know I’ll give it a lot more thought.
As with every trip, even those on a Greyhound bus on a special day, it’s probably more about the journey than the destination.