Random Visitors to My Brain

This post is a collection of random instances, memories and thoughts. The only strand connecting these disparate whits is that they have wandered into my brain at various times, stayed for lunch, and left. Most of these are memories my brain shows me like a vintage slide show. Some are things I’ve wondered numerous times. These are not momentous events. They are simply random musings.

• A crumb: my first memory is from when I was quite a wee bairn. I don’t know my age - probably 3 or 4. The memory is simply this: I had just gotten out of the bathtub and while my mother went to get a fresh towel I put a corner of the wet washcloth in my mouth and clambered onto the toilet seat. I grabbed the corner of the sink and leaned over to look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. I met my eyes in the mirror, wet white washcloth dangling from the corner of my mouth. And I had a thought: I am going to remember this. And thus I have.

  

• A snippet: During one of my Paris sojourns I was trying to get from République to Le Centre Pompidou via a rented bicyclette. This was, I thought, a straight shot if I just went down the right street. I know the Pompidou Center was ‘over there.’ But as I continued on the bike in what I thought was the right direction I found I was not seeing any familiar landmarks. Before too long I realized I was utterly lost. I looked for someone to ask directions of. I looked down a narrow street and saw a nice-looking woman standing on a small porch. I rode the bike up to her and said hello (one must always begin with ‘bonjour’ when addressing a stranger in Paris) and asked if I could ask for directions. She smiled sweetly and said of course. I asked where the Pompidou Center was from her house. She smiled again and put her hand on my arm and pointed with the other in quite a different direction that where I had been heading. She explained that Paris was built on a series of circles, and one needed to know which streets crossed through them. As she spoke she lightly caressed my forearm, which I found uncharacteristically friendly for a Parisian woman I’d just met to do. I looked further down the narrow, winding street and saw there were quite a number of other Parisian ladies, also standing on their small porches, all dressed quite nicely (although in somewhat revealing attire.) The nice lady I’d been asking directions of caught the realization in my eyes and laughed kindly as I blushed from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. I apologized and she laughed again, and said there was nothing to apologize for. I asked if she would like a little cash for her trouble and she said to come back later after I’d visited the museum. She squeezed my shoulder, I thanked her, and rode off in the direction of French arte moderne.

  

• A tittle: Paul and I were driving along a Chicago street many years ago and he noticed there were purposefully-planned holes in each of the front porches of the houses we were passing.

  

“What are those for?” Paul asked.
I spontaneously answered, “Those are for the mother of the dead bride.” Paul nodded thoughtfully. We drove in silence for a while afterwards, out of respect.

• A mote: on another day on another street in Chicago (I think it was Ashland Avenue) I noticed an electronic bank sign, the kind that would display the time and temperature, and sometimes a slogan or advertizing message shaped out of the grid of lights on its surface. (These have largely been replaced since with LED color screens which function more or less as electronic billboards) As I looked at this bank sign it was clear it had gone insane. Instead of time or temperature or slogan, the sign was proclaiming random bits of Lite Brite gibberish, occasionally pausing to flash something completely unintelligible three or four times. I pictured someone’s cat sitting on a keyboard inside the bank. Then, as I watched, the screen went blank and a single word swam across its surface: … sorrow … Then the gibberish started back up again.
I swear this happened. No one was in the car with me, and this was years before smartphones so I couldn’t take a video for proof. But I swear on the grave of Washington Mutual that this absolutely happened just as I recount here.

• A fragment: shouldn’t all the words in ‘Good blood food’ rhyme? Did they at one point? If so, which vowel sound won?

• A bite: I was visiting my paternal grandparents one weekend when I was 10. This was my first overnight-and-alone stay with them - I had only seen them in their element during Thanksgiving or other family dinners. My grandfather tucked me into the fold-out bed in the basement on that first night. The next morning I smelled coffee and heard sounds of breakfast being prepared upstairs. I got dressed and came upstairs to find my grandparents seated at their kitchen table with a place set for me. “Good morning! Have a seat!” my grandfather crowed. But I could not move from where I stood in the doorway. In a bowl in the center of the table were several tightly-bound bundles of twigs. My grandmother took a spoon and a fork and maneuvered one of these bundles into her own bowl and - I kid you not - poured milk over it. She then took a spoon and began to crunch through the twigs so vigorously I thought the bowl would break. My grandfather pulled my chair out and gestured for me to be seated. Dazed by the sight I beheld and the new knowledge that my grandparents were calmly insane I slowly sat down. My grandfather - I swear I’m not making this up - took a spoon and fork and portioned one of the mangled bird’s nests into my own bowl. I stared down at it. It looked like something they had found under the house, several months ago. The peddler from the cover of Led Zeppelin IV had dropped his thorny burden off at the back door early that morning. My grandparents were eating it - with apparent relish - and expecting me to follow suit. My grandfather poured milk over the bundle of branches in my bowl and gestured with his spoon. I didn’t want to look into my bowl, afraid I would see a nest of spiders chased out of their dry home by the invasion of milk. “What’s wrong, Eric?” my grandmother asked, after she’d finished making her way through her first bite, “Don’t you like shredded wheat?”

My mom had bought shredded wheat for us a few times before: tan little square nuggets with shiny white stripes on one side. What I saw before me had no relation whatsoever to what lay before me. I did some quick calculations in my head. If what we’d had back at home was shredded wheat, that must have been the pupa version. My grandparents were eating the termite queen of shredded wheat for breakfast, and it filled me with a Lovecraftian horror I was not able to shake for a very long time.

As you can see, one unit of shredded wheat is the size of half of a factory.

• A related gobbet: during one family dinner at my grandparents’ house my grandmother was telling us things she’d been making in the kitchen. She made damn fine chocolate chip cookies (not the Toll House recipe, thank you very much) and was also deft at lemon meringue pie, pot roast and gravy. “Tomorrow I’m going to make some ammonia cookies,” she announced. I looked at her and began to giggle. My elegant, soft-spoken grandmother had quietly gone off her rocker and was now putting cleaning solvents into baked goods. She might as well have said “Tomorrow I’m going to make some Pine-Sol muffins.” Everyone at the table looked mutely at me and my laughter began to descend into a sort of madness, the situation made all the funnier since no one else raised as much as part of a lip. My grandmother eventually said in perturbed wonder, “Well, Eric!” My hysterics gradually subsided.

Tomorrow I’m going to make a Lysol pie.

• A final extract: I always have a song in my head. Always. Right now it’s ‘Falling in Love With Love’ although I can’t tell you when it began playing on my mental jukebox or why. Every once in a while a song will take up residence in my brain for a day or two. A few years ago I found myself waking up every morning for a month with Steely Dan’s ‘Kid Charlemagne’ in my head. I don’t know why. I didn’t mind: I’m quite a Dan fan, and I like that song. It is with great surprise that I periodically find The Babys’ ‘Isn’t it Time’ pushing <play> in my brain. I never bought the 45. I didn’t know the name of the group until the umpteenth time the song set down its suitcase in the foyer of my noggin and I went to YouTube to find out who it was. I think ‘Isn’t It Time’ was the Babys’ one hit. Why did it find specific resonance with me? Why does it visit me again and again like a distant uncle I keep forgetting I’m related to? Was the spelling a deliberate choice or did they not know that an ending ‘y’ turns into ‘ies’ when pluralized? The song begins with quite an interesting chordal pattern which repeats through each verse. The chorus delivers a pretty standard 70s not-yet-disco club rock feel. The lead singer gives off some mild Bowie vibes in the video, but I didn’t see any of this when the song was the vague hit that it was in the 70s. So why this song? I don’t know. Maybe my brain is trying to tell me something and I’m too dense to figure it out. I just can’t find the answers to the questions that keep going through my mind.