morethanenoughtruth

There’s only so much room in a human brain, or any other confabulation of neurons.  It is, after all, only a tangle of wily cells that convene and collude.  They pass along information out of joy.  Why else would beats of energy course down paths they have already pulsed, and to what avail?  No wonder it hurts to think about being old, with so much to remember.  How many books have I read?  How many idle hours spent gawking at pixelated depictions of other people’s thoughts?  All of that I hope to remember and never ever forget.  And we don’t forget—completely.

Grab a book you might have read but can’t be sure.  Open it and start traipsing across lines of letters.  Familiarity raises its silly head and mocks your attempt to make new acquaintances out of lexicon.  “I’ve read this before,” it chortles.  You might ignore it and continue to peruse.  What, after all, is the resolution of all this texty perturbation?  Can you reach into the mire of memory and pluck out the final denouement?  Probably not, but if you determine to read it anyway, it will open itself like a love-sick girl begging you to enter her very core.  And you don’t stop.  You read anyway and take a stupid pleasure in piling remembrances on top of amazements as if this were something new, after all is read and done.  Such dilemmas pose their plight anew each line and wait for you to throw the tome aside and seek another.  It’s a virgin read you want, one that tempts with mysterium of never-read-before, where every line is pristine to your ravenous intent to know what you have never known, and did not of yourself invent. 

There is a purpose to my rave.  I am out to prove that we do remember all we read, perhaps not with precision, but with predictable fidelity and honest intuition of the somehow familiar.  If that is the case, can memory press on into some undefinable future?  Is brain a bottomless pit of wanting to know?  Surely there are only so many ways to ply the axons of cranial maze, and we will run out of space and acronyms of purposeful complexity.  What happens then?  Might we have evolved some cunning ploy to conserve, a judicious perspicacity to set aside a request for mnemonic retrieval and then wait a bit for information to rise unbidden on its own.  The senior moment seems to describe just such a ploy.  Accepting this shenanigan as a normal healthy activity of an ageing brain might lower anxiety and allow to work whatever will.

A case in point is my encountering a Jodi Picoult book vulnerable to my acquisition, just perched on the shelf at Oakley Library.  It was unusual to find it so disarmed, so available, with no need to work my IT demands that it be where I want it to be.  It just slid it right off the shelf into my hands.  A new one not read before?  Surely not.  I have, after all, read all of them by now.  I wagged it home, heavy in my book bag, prickling with possibility of being a pristine read, a virgin.  Eschewing foreplay and irradiated Lean Cuisine, I took it straight to bed, lit with bedside lamp, hot-water-bottle cooked to toe-warming bliss, and snuggled down for a read.

I smoothed the slick library cover, taking in the blue, a nebulous coloration that gives away nothing, just suggests a gentle aura of sadness.  Even the title, Leaving Time, gives away nothing, simply titillating at-the-ready synapses.  The book is about a girl whose mother, an over-educated scientific pachyderm whisperer, suddenly disappears.  This leave-taking sets the stage for a young girl’s entire lifetime of sleuthing.  Where did Mommy go, and why?

I know after a few paragraphs that I have read this book before, but what happened?  How did it end?  As I scan each line there is the sweet reminiscence of having been this way before, but since I can’t place the terminus, it might be useful to fill some time with revisiting those pleasant hours.  Picoult is always a good read, maybe even good enough to read again, given the beauty of her language and how she tinkers with the words while I watch her poetry unfurl, my fixation a veritable verbal voyeur.  Is it a waste of time and alliteration, or shall I read at least until I remember how it all unwinds?  As senility works its will, perhaps there is some consolation in the possibility of meeting minds anew, that we have erstwhile loved and lost.  We do not, after all, apologize for cherishing melodies that have graced listening ears a thousand times before.  It’s their very familiarity that measures how we love them.  I would gladly hear La Traviata sung again and yet again as long as ears parse sounds and lips shape smiles.

Read Full Post »

One of the most terrifying features of any Zoom meeting is its facility for supporting instant elections.  Most recently, when I offered an easy fix for an electronic defugalty, our moderator directed the assembly to agree or disagree with my bright idea by raising hands.  Only two hands joined mine, and I mercifully can’t remember whose they were.  Of course my lizard brain regressed into a defensive crouch.  I had been there many times before.  Recently and probably most painfully, my dearly beloved bible study group could only accommodate one translation of the week’s scripture on our virtual link.  Pastor reasonably asked for a show of hands.  If the New Revised Standard Version won, he would read the text himself; if the Robert Alter Version were chosen, taking my turn as designated Alter reader, I would be the one to intone the poetic phraseology.  I voted for Alter; everybody else voted for the NRSV.  They didn’t want me to read.  It was clear.  It hurt too much to bear, and I faded out of biblical exegesis entirely.

Whether authentic or delusional, memories haunt and hurt.  Attending twenty-six schools over my twelve years of public and private education, zig-zagging back and forth across Mason-Dixon line, I was ever the new girl—always different—speaking Texas twang in Massachusetts—the next year irritating my Texas homeland with Yankee acquired r-dropping.  I was a stranger in whatever strange land, no matter where I made my bed.

In the fourth grade I learned how to give a name to this miserable syndrome.  The classroom teacher directed every person to write on a piece of paper the name of the classmate they liked best of all.  She collected the sheets and assembled a chart placing a name in every circle.  Vectors drawn from each person to the one they preferred depicted strands of affiliation as arrows.  Partnerships and mutual crushes chose each other.  Popularity kings and queens fairly jumped off the page, impaled by a crush of arrows.  Only one circle stood alone, having been chosen by no one.  That circle was me.  So proud was teacher of her achievement that she provided a copy of the chart for every person to take home.  “The one identified as not worthy of choice by any person is called a social isolate,” she explained as she smiled and distributed her artwork.  That’s when everybody turned around and looked at me.

Down through the years I lived in fear of group dynamics, circles of affiliation floating behind my eyes, and threatening to make of truth a bludgeon.  Never was I voted into any classroom office.  No matter how hard I worked to excel, it was only the teacher who valued my efforts.  In high school the boys called me the nose, a commentary on my pursuit of high marks, assuming it was an obsession to please the instructors.  It was a relief when my high school yearbook did not report that slur in its featured list of unofficial titles.  I did have a snip of revenge at the annual Staples High School awards ceremony.  Trying to ignore my spiteful classmates as they poked me and yanked my braids, I heard my name called and climbed onstage to accept the Bausch & Lomb Honorary Science Award and then the PTA science scholarship.  I didn’t return to my seat but found and claimed a more congenial one.  Of course they hated me.

It wasn’t until my late twenties in Dallas that I joined an Adult Singles Sunday School class at Highland Park Methodist Church.  This huge congregation supported equally sizeable “small” groups, our class alone numbering over 200.  Soon I was acting out my nascent leadership.  Elected as Social Chairman, I planned wildly creative monthly events that swelled our number to unwieldy proportions.  We soon were pulling in the unchurched with zeal and were accused of too much success, perhaps even fomenting a “meat-market.”  Soon we earned a new sponsor whose quiet agenda was to quell the spirit in the interest of propriety, but I have never forgotten those lovely Methodists who elected me to an office.  It’s too bad that senior church management, when confronted with Christian love, could attribute it only to body heat. 

Later when settling in as a West Virginia farm wife, I began attending Ritchie County Farm Women’s Club’s monthly meetings.  Elected to office, I served as president for three years.  It looked like a coup, so finally I stepped down to encourage somebody else to take a turn.  It felt good to be part of a group, and I continued to reach for affiliation, as down through the years the pain of rejection was always worth the possibility of belonging.

Too much truth can assault the soul.  In 2011 I made a blog and named it morethanenoughtruth.com.  My site and I set out to have the last word.  If I speak my truth first, perhaps it won’t hurt so much.  As I settle into my eighty-second year, it is distressing to report that even now those early memories rise up and state their bitter case.  Just the suggestion that a minor dispute might be settled by vote is enough to throw me back into that frightening time, and suddenly a too-emotional response appears inappropriate to all who experienced growing up as something pleasantly normal.

Read Full Post »