The other day my wife asked me something about my hip arthritis.
“Hip arthritis”? I say.
“Yeah,” she says and repeats her question.
“I don’t have hip arthritis,” I say.
“Of course you do,” she says.
“Uh, it’s my hip. I think I’d know”.
She gives me that look.
“Don’t you remember going to PT for it?”
“I remember going to PT but it wasn’t because of arthritis.”
The very idea!
“Oh yeah?” she says. “Then what was it for?”
“Hell, I dunno. SI joints probably.”
“That was a different PT.”
Oh yeah. At my age, it’s SI joints, knees, rotator cuffs, plantar fasciitis, you lose track of them after a while. I end the discussion with a zinger.
“Whatev,” I say.
Again the look.
“OK, boomer,” she says and goes into her office to do whatever twaddle it is she does in there.
Nothing cuts to the quick like getting an “OK boomer” from another boomer.
I go back to my important work of Tweeting my latest gems. But I can’t stop thinking about that PT. What the heck was it for? Then I remembered. I’d gone to the doctor because I had a groin issue that wouldn’t go away.
“Well,” says the doc. “Not your groin, probably some arthritis in your hip.”
And X-rays proved her right.
Damn.
On the other hand, playing Trivial Pursuit one time I get the question “In what city was the 1932 Democratic convention?” Oh man. How the hell am I supposed to know that? The other players look smug AF seeing the end of my turn when I suddenly blurt out, “Chicago!” And I wasn’t guessing. I suddenly knew it was Chicago.
So here’s the thing. What kind of system remembers the 1932 Democratic convention, and old as I am, I ain’t that old, was in Chicago but then forgets I have hip arthritis? Who’s in charge here? Who decides what to remember and what to forget? Wasn’t me. Not the conscious me anyway. Some circuitry in my brain for sure but how does it work? What’s the algorithm?
Well, beats hell outta me. That said, however, I do have a number of childhood memories in which the algorithm is obvious. In each, something happened I did not understand at the time and my memory management system stashed it away for future interpretation.
Here are four such memories from before we moved to Allison Street.
I am sitting at the table in Grandmom Gillon’s kitchen eating powdered sugar donuts and milk. Grandmom has her back to me, doing dishes at the sink. My parents are in the next room, the dining room, arguing. There is shouting. As I raise my glass to drink, the oilcloth tablecloth sticks to my bare forearm which comes away with a scritching sound. Grandmom looks toward the dining room and smiles.
Now why would Grandmom smile at my parents’ arguing? Well, as I learned later, and previously mentioned, Grandmom was opposed to Pop’s marriage. And Grandmom was a petty, vindictive bitch. When she was older and had to live with us in Tampa, she more than once purposely peed on the floor so Mom would have to clean it up. And my sisters watched her one day in the back yard carefully tip over a lawn chair then lay down next to it in order to fake having fallen over in it. But at the time of my memory she was just a nice lady who fed me donuts.
The next two happened in the living room at Aunt Helen’s, possibly at the same get together. There being no TV back then, the chairs and couches that lined every wall were full of relatives, all on the Wise side. I rolled on the rug and laughed, even though the rug smelled dirty, because cousin Helen was tickling me. She was really going at it, digging her fingers into my ribs. Everyone was laughing, I was laughing. But here’s the thing. I didn’t like it. I actually remember disliking the tickling and wondering to myself why I was laughing.
Come to think of it, I still don’t understand that one. I can understand Helen. She’s maybe 12 at the time, probably justifiably fed up with her too cute little cousin following her around, getting all the attention. Has a chance to get back at him a bit in a socially acceptable way. Who’s turning down a shot like that? Question is, why was I laughing? Why did I play along, cooperate? To this day, when a tot is being tickled and giggling I look closely to see if they’re actually enjoying it.
Egad. Why do I even try? Googling “why do we laugh when tickled” I find this:
Laughing when tickled in our sensitive spots (under the arms, near the throat and under our feet) could be a defensive mechanism. Research suggests that we have evolved to send this signal out to show our submission to an aggressor, to dispel a tense situation and prevent us from getting hurt.
So it seems I filed that memory away until there was Google. BTW, gorillas exhibit the exact same behavior.
At either that same event or a similar one I was sitting on that same rug. Pop stood by the front door looking like he wished he had a cyanide capsule. As I looked around, it seemed that everyone was talking. Wait, I thought. Who’s listening? I conducted a careful experiment. I picked my Mother to start with and tried to discover who was listening to her. I looked at each grown-up in turn but, not only was not one of them listening to my Mother, each one was also talking. I tried Aunt Helen. Again, no one listening. The only person not talking besides Pop was Grandpop who sat in his chair in one corner of the room. But just because he wasn’t talking didn’t mean he was listening. I saw him reach into his shirt pocket and turn off his hearing aid.
The fourth memory was at Grandmom Gillon’s. I have no idea why I’d been asleep there since it had to have been well after we’d left. Nevertheless I woke up in the back bedroom, Uncle Pete’s room. It was a bright, warm day. Dust motes fluttering in the sun beams that streamed through the window and onto the floor mesmerized me. I couldn’t see them anywhere else, only in the rays of light. Were they only in the light, or were they everywhere and you could only see them in the light? If they were everywhere, when you breathed wouldn’t they go up your nose? That must be okay, though, since it happened to everyone. (Turns out it’s less than optimal. See below).
Standing, I felt on the bottoms of my feet the sun-warmed wood and the narrow cracks between the floor boards. Folded on the chair I saw the clothing I would wear that day. My mother laughed downstairs in the kitchen. I didn’t fancy presenting myself to the adults in my underwear, nor did I want to wait until my mother came upstairs to dress me. What if I dressed myself, I wondered. Could I?
I rehearsed the process in my mind. The shirt had buttons and grown-ups teased kids whose buttons weren’t aligned. But if I started at the bottom and worked my way up, making sure not to skip any buttons or buttonholes, wouldn’t I end up just right? The zipper and top button of the pants didn’t worry me, I did those all the time after peeing or pooping. Same with buckling the belt but I’d have to be careful when putting it on not to miss any loops in the back. Socks were easy but the shoes could be tricky. Some kids got their shoes on the wrong feet, though I couldn’t see how they could do that, it looked so funny. It was the laces that bothered me but I decided that if I got that far I wouldn’t be ashamed to have a grown-up finish them. To my surprise, however, I discovered I had somehow learned how to tie my shoes. How had that happened?
Downstairs I found a group of adults around the kitchen table.
“What’s this?” someone said. “All dressed up!”
“Well, well, well,” said someone else. “What a big boy!”
Then my father bent down smiling and said, “Let’s see how he did.”
He checked my buttons, belt, zipper and finally my shoes.
“I’ll be,” he said. “He got everything right.”
What they expected 
What they got
Why was Pop disappointed? He was expecting a small chuckle and didn’t get it. Now that I think about it, this might have been the first time I remember disappointing Pop. It would not be the last.
Finally, I didn’t want to break the flow of the story but more needs saying regarding those dust motes. There are scientific explanations about why we see them in beams of sunlight (but not artificial light) but I’m more interested in what they are. Bits of dirt, sand (some from the Sahara!), dead skin, microplastic particles (which are NOT good for you), and fecal pellets from these guys ->
Ideal pets. You never have to walk them, they won’t tear up your toilet paper, no trips to the vet. To feed them, just be yourself. Go to bed at night, shed on your pillow and sheets, they’ll clean up after you! And you don’t need a litter box. Just recycle their pellets when you breathe.
Sweet dreams.
