Harvest

Autumn has always been my favourite season because of its association with my idyllic memories of harvest. When I think of my favourite autumn colours, they are in terms of farming and rural life: the burnt orange of pea stubble; the sunny gold of aspens; the scattering of yellow and red leaves over green grass; the rich variety of pale and deep brown grains; the dusty red of the Big Grain Truck—puny by today's semi standards; the bare grey-brown of dirt trails packed hard by heavy machinery; the clear blue of the autumn sky, the flame of prairie sunset. There are of course the less palatable harvest memories, too: clouds of fat grasshoppers whirring into your hair and down your shirt collar; the burning fumes of caraway seed; dust choking the air inside the combine cab. Even these have a certain nostalgia attached to them.

When I was very young and there was still a bustling hub of a grain elevator in my hometown, I would sometimes get to tag along when dad hauled a load to town. Sometimes my brother was also in the truck cab, and one of us would sit on an upturned 5-gallon pail between the two seats. My earliest memory is from before I began school, probably when I was taken along out of necessity on days when my mom was away at a 12-hour shift. I'm watching as wheat pours liquidly out of the truck's raised box and pools onto a grate in the floor. An elevator employee and my dad work with grain shovels to encourage the grain out of the truck and through the grate. Everything has that golden tint of prairie autumn sunshine, and shafts of light ignite the airborne grain dust.

My next earliest memories of harvest were riding along on the self-propelled swather, as my dad cut hay near the yard or long rounds around golden fields. I sat on the sunny engine-warmed flat space in back of the seat, wearing heavy-duty earmuffs, feeling more than hearing the contented whirr of the blades as they cut through the crop while the reel gently batted the cut sheaves onto the conveyor belt, spinning a golden swath that trailed behind us.

I would watch my father as he prepared and maintained the machinery each day, going over it with a grease gun, repairing conveyor belts, blowing chaff from the radiators with the air compressor. If I was lucky he would save the delicate pith ball for me. If I was luckier, I'd be able to help out in some small way.

Later, I would ride in the tractor cab as the combine gobbled up the cured swaths and the hopper filled with a bounty of grain. Sitting on the narrow window ledge in the tractor cab, my dad would sing in his clear tenor, and I would join in. Years later when I was in university and driving the swather or combine on my own, I sang those same songs that he had taught me.

Thexder

For five and a half years, I worked at the front desk of a music conservatory. The days were filled with the sounds of all kinds of instruments: voice and piano, strings and brass, percussion and a particularly ghastly saxophone. There were students practicing technique or in lessons with their teachers, faculty polishing their repertoire for upcoming performances, intensive summer academies that drew fine musicians from across the country, and touring artists performing in one of our venues. All these sounds drifted down to the front desk and mingled into a cacophony that was both beautiful and aggravating.

And one autumn, a particular melody began to emanate from the piano wing directly above the desk. It was familiar, but how did I know it...

It didn't take me long to place: it was the theme song from a computer game that i had played as a child, back in the golden days of DOS. You were a sort of humanoid-aircraft transformer, flying through a maze and blasting barricades and malevolent pixel-formations with a laser.  I could picture the game perfectly, I could hear the 8-bit tones in my mind, but the name frustratingly escaped my memory.

The pianist practiced the song faithfully; every day the melody tormented me until one quiet evening, as I manned the desk for the solo night shift, I determined to find out the name. Knowing only that I was looking for a DOS game from the 1980s, my internet search led me to an alphabetical list on Wikipedia. I paged through the list, not at all sure I would even recognize the name if i saw it—but eventually I found it.

Thexder.

Like any name that hovers frustratingly just beyond the reach of your memory, it only took a glimpse to prompt that eurekic moment of total recall.

old-school Thexder

I eagerly found a YouTube video of the theme song; it was what the mystery pianist was playing! Fitting a missing piece into the jigsaw  puzzle of the past gives you the kind of wings that you just have to share. I sent my boyfriend an excited chat-rendition of the mystery I had just solved, and linked the video. Almost immediately, he wrote back:

"Oh, that's the Moonlight Sonata," he said.
"No it isn't," I contradicted, offended.

It was, of course, which made the situation extra ridiculous. Here I was, a classically trained musician who had started piano lessons at age 5 and had spent a wildly successful year in voice performance at university. Here I was, sitting inside a music conservatory where I was both a student of composition and an employee in the administrative office. And not only had I not recognized a famous Beethoven sonata; I had actually recognized it first as a song from a computer game I had played nearly twenty years ago. The irony of it might just be my favourite thing ever.

Castle Adventure

DOS is one of those things that makes me almost unreasonably nostalgic. I remember the day when a very young me spent a good five minutes trying to open a primitive golf game, eventually realizing that I had been typing gulf the whole time.  I remember searching for sigmas and section signs in Castle Adventure. I remember the downstairs computer with the green screen that only had three functions: printing text documents, Typing Tutor, and Prince of Persia. I remember the old dot matrix printer with its semi-transparent continuous paper. I remember the 8-bit melodies and 5¼-inch floppy disks. At the conservatory, I was the sole supporter of our DOS-based registration system, misguidedly resisting the browser-based replacement that was phased in halfway through my tenure.

They say that smell is the sense most linked to memory, but music has always been my primary passion. I like to think that the Thexder Incident is more revealing of how important memories and the past are to me, rather than how poor my mental library of repertoire is.