Month: December 2017

Holding On to Memories

Holding on to Memories.

I don’t know what’s going on in grandson Linus’s head. The dump trucks, the jungle gym, the soft, cushiony wood chips all conspire to create a place in his Thought World that he might play back hundreds of times, spanning many decades. It could be the beginning of a warm, embracing memory.

Memories. Some are so powerful, others so fleeting.

My earliest memory is sitting at a stainless steel dinette set in our kitchen. It was lunch time, and my high chair seat was pulled close. As she navigated the spoon toward my closed mouth, my mother teased me to open up.

“Here comes a car. Open the garage door! Here come the cows! Open the barn door! Come on! Here comes a plane, coming in for a landing!”

I remember that. The chrome chair legs, the red vinyl cushions, the white plastic table top with abstract grey squiggles. Like yesterday.

But ask me what I did last weekend. I’m clueless.

Memories are weird that way.

One time I caught myself in the garage, in my underwear, carrying a flyswatter. And I asked myself, “What am I supposed to be doing in the garage in my underwear with a flyswatter?’ Never came up with the answer.

Don’t tell me it’s never happened to you. I won’t believe you.

This week I heard a riveting news story. Researchers are discovering that as we age, two particular brain waves get out of synchronization when we sleep. Not by much. By milliseconds. But those milliseconds are critical to long term memory. Without this highly coordinated fleeting brain wave dance, the memories get lost. Short term memories never have a chance to be converted into long term memory.

They will not make the trip from short-term ephemeral experience into permanent, vivid long-term permanence. Access to that memory fades away.

I wish I could remember everything I once knew. I wish I could recall everything that I once experienced. I’d be the most brilliant and interesting person on the block.

But it sounds like that’s not going to happen.

That’s why we need photographs and journals to help remind us of the short-term stuff that lost its way.

More than that, that’s why we need our friends, so we can re-live the good times together.

The Ugly Smoothie Bus

Painted sky-blue with a bright red staircase at the far end, the ugly bus is too boxy, too oversized for proper use as a smoothie stand. Unlikely umbrellas sprouting out the top, like oversized inverted T.V. satellite dishes, add to the comic effect.

Instead, smoothie stands should be cute, accessible and inviting, not bulky, cold and intimidating. Shouldn’t they?

Recently, I witnessed another incongruous event—a television interview with famed Canadian actor, Donald Sutherland, who is now 82. He is the veteran of over 150 film roles, although he confesses to have never viewed many of those films.

I assumed Sutherland to be self-assured, a man of confidence. Instead, he was surprisingly uncertain and full of comic introspection.

He is especially put off by his own physical appearance. As a young boy, he asked his mother if he were good looking. Avoiding a direct response to his query, and after a long pause, she answered, “Your face has character, Donald.” He escaped to his room to hide.

“It’s not easy to know that you’re an ugly man,” he reflected in the interview.

To be beautiful, to be handsome seems to be what it’s all about. But common sense tells us that looks aren’t everything. Consider King Saul, the most handsome of men, but a royal disaster.

In fact, all of us have bits out of place. It’s those out-of-place, incongruent bits that make us who we are–the knobby nose, the unequal ears, the scrubby brows.

Many of us, like Donald Sutherland, have misgivings about ourselves. Like the oversized sky-blue smoothie bus with red staircase, we feel ugly as a giant smoothie stand.

Yet, it’s that same sky-blue and red paint and odd umbrellas that make the smoothie stand so memorable, unexpected and delightful; there’s an incongruent party going on.

Without those peculiar ears, chin and eyes, we’d miss Donald Sutherland. He just wouldn’t be the same.

And without our own slightly whacky, slightly unexpected but thoroughly engaging bits, neither would we.

Childlike Wonder

A water drain beneath their street was enough to draw grandchildren Holland, Linus and Thatcher in for a spelunking adventure. Nets and cups. Check. Rain galoshes. Check. Those corrugated steel pipes might contain toad or salamander trophies, or perhaps a scrap of unknown substance. My guess would be kryptonite.

When we are young, everything is new and undiscovered, so there is wonderment in everything. As we age, we can become criminally hardened to wonderment, to the “oddness” of things since we have seen it all before.

Last week, while taking a shower, an odd juxtaposition occurred. I draped my fresh clothes over hooks and unceremoniously dropped my old, soiled clothes in a pile on the floor.

Stepping into the shower, I closed the curtain behind me. With preliminary preparations completed, there was no turning back when I heard, and then spied, an enormous blue bottle house fly. I was imprisoned with this beast, cordoned off from the world, within the confines of fiberglass wall and shower curtain.

Shortly, I recognized that the fly’s incessant dive-bombing of my normally-inaccessible body parts could not go on. Defenseless, with reaction time inadequate to squash him and with no flyswatter in sight, I sought a means to destroy him.

We are blessed with an extremely efficient hot water tank, and doubly blessed to possess a shower head with a hand wand. Standing well back, shower wand in hand, I cranked the water knob all the way to the left–to scorch mode.

Briefly, the fly’s buzz escalated to the wail of a tiny ambulance siren, as the fly frantically sought an escape route. The wail was quickly extinguished when the scalding water fried the pest’s innards.

I wondered over the power and authority I possessed to end this pest’s life, a life so annoying yet wondrous in its creation. It lay, limp and tiny in the shower stall, a miraculous trophy of art and engineering. I felt both powerful and humbled.

There it went, down the drain, down the sewer. Perhaps my grandchildren will soon find their own creation trophy in a sewer drain beneath a road, fish it out with their net, and share in its wonder.

Communications Revolution

There’s just one word that describes the latest communications methodology: stunning.

This new advance offers a social media platform that is transformative, without depending upon any underlying technology. Breathtaking, really.

Two blocks down from author Jen Hatmaker’s residence in Buda, Texas, the Buda Soda Fountain is not where you would expect to find this awesome technology. Yet there it is, operating from this humble business since long before the creation of Apple and Microsoft. But there is no Internet data to purchase, no setup charge, and never a need to call tech support.

Amazingly, there are no devices—of any kind—needed to get this system to work. No laptop, no smartphone, no Wi-Fi.

To give this system a thorough test, Jackie and grandson, Linus, sat down together with this amazing invisible technology at the Buda Soda Fountain. Prior to the test, the TSA searched them for any hidden technology designed to cheat this experiment.

To my consternation, the experiment worked brilliantly! Yes, you heard me correctly; I witnessed it! There they were, communicating with each other without any apparent technology!

First, using his mouth, Linus would speak directly to Jackie—in perfectly intelligible words. She would listen, and then, apparently understanding what he said, she would utter her response back to him—in real time! They continued this interaction repeatedly, over and over and over again, and—I repeat—it worked without a glitch or hiccup, using no visible electronic equipment!

In addition to communicating words, this killer technology offers amazing color rendition. It blew away Apple’s cutting edge Super Retina screen display technology. Check out the vibrant shade of bluish-green. Simply unreal! Again, no visible technology was employed! This is real-time communication using real-world rays of light!

Apparently, the eventual goal is to bring this awesome real-as-life technology to other universally-accessible soda shops, dining tables or living rooms that are available to both you and me. Amazing!

It’s a right-on-time, not-available-at-your-local-store technology that could radically change our world.