memories

Memories are odd things--wispy, wraith-like, shadowy creatures of the cracks and convolutions of the mind.

I sometimes tell people that if Bern wasn't around I wouldn't remember anything.

Other times I say, "If it weren't for faulty memory, I'd have no memory at all...."

Yet other times some ghostly image or sound comes into consciousness for no discernible reason at all. Like this morning. Walking downstairs to have breakfast, suddenly, out of nowhere, came this song:
"Would you like to swing on a star,
Carry moonbeams home in a jar,
And be better off than you are,
Or would you rather be a pig?
A pig is an animal with dirt on its face
Ta-da--da--da--da-da-da ta"

That's where memory fails. So all morning I've been trying to remember the rest of the song, who performed it, when it came from....Don't bother telling me I could Google it. I know, I know.

One of the things that is good about the internet is being able to find the poem that one remembered couplet came from...the capitol of some obscure country...the Latin name for Primrose--stuff like that. But sometimes, it seems to me at any rate, it is instructive to merely ponder lost memories, see if you can tease or entice them out of their hiding place in the unconscious mind, be bothered by not being able to remember....

(Isn't it amazing how "Google"--the name of a company--a noun--has become a verb. "Google it", we say all the time.

Several years ago WVU had a basketball player named Potsnagle--something like that, I don't remember exactly. He was a 6'11" center. But he was also a wonderful three point shooter. He would slip out of the post to above the foul line, take a pass and drop in a long jump shot. The announcer on TV would say, "Villanova's been Potsnagled..."


That and 'googled' are my two favorite nouns misused.)