Sometimes a memory comes zipping through my mind for no apparent reason, some good, some not so. Yesterday one that I have carried around for sixty years or so visited me, and I smiled at remembering it. I once saw a man riding a fast horse that would not stop until it got inside the barn; it forced the rider to almost crawl inside the critter’s skin to get low enough so as not to get knocked off its back. The rider was my uncle Robert whom I have known forever as Buddy. Health issues have caused him to alter his life style, and I thought a phone call to him to reminisce about this scene would be welcomed. I think it was. “Stubby was his name, a pretty good horse. Dad got him for me from A. C. Weig.”
We visited for quite some time, and I enjoyed talking with him again. Other topics got discussed. I’ve always enjoyed listening to army veteran’s tales of service. His was in Korea as an artilleryman. He told me of once coming under such a heavy mortar barrage that they had to stay hunkered down so much that they couldn’t shoot back. It seems like some of the most enjoyable moments in life are unplanned, as was this spontaneous phone call to him. The brief e-mails or message texting so prevalent now do not replace a pleasant visit on the phone. To take it further, personal letter writing has declined; it is a rare occasion to receive one in this present day of immediate electronic communication.
Back to the topic of memories, I took enough psychology courses in my liberal arts education to learn just how complicated the brain is and that memory recall varies from person to person. A book on my shelf titled Man’s Unconquerable Mind contains a passage I have returned to many times: “Day and night, from childhood to old age, sick or well, asleep or awake, men and women think. The brain works like the heart, ceaselessly pulsing. In its three pounds’ weight of tissue are recorded and stored billions upon billions of memories, habits, instincts, abilities, desires and hopes and fears, patterns and tinctures and sounds and inconceivably delicate calculations and brutishly crude urgencies, the sound of a whisper heard thirty years ago, the resolution impressed by daily practice for fifteen thousand days, the hatred cherished since childhood, the delight never experienced but incessantly imagined, the complex structure of stresses in a bridge, the exact pressure of a single finger on a single string, the development of ten thousand different games of chess, the precise curve of a lip, a hill, an equation, or a flying ball, tones and shades and glooms and raptures, the faces of countless strangers, the scent of one garden, prayers, inventions, crimes, poems, jokes, tunes, sums, problems unsolved, victories long past, the fear of Hell and the love of God, the vision of a blade of grass and the vision of the sky filled with stars.”
