Monday, January 8, 2018

Where is the toilet plunger?!...

Shel Silverstein - I was first introduced to his poems 30 years ago, when a friend gifted me a hard copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends. Lines read and re-read, some even pasted into memory - the kind so tightly glued that they can still be quoted years later, decades later!

It all began when the toilet plunger became a pretend light saber. The life of that play was cut immediately short. "Do you know where that has been?!" Inside shutter, slight gag, before demanding hand washings. "Teddy said it was a hat, so I put it on. Now Daddy's saying, "Where the heck's the toilet plunger gone?" The words tumbled out of my memory and mind, onto my tongue. I laughed. It could have been worse, right?

It provoked me to contemplate the aspects of memory - the way the brain works and remembers. Obviously, if we constantly repeat things, we tend to remember them....or maybe not obviously, but it seems to be the case. However, do you remember that song - the one that came out when you were twelve and played through the speakers of your radio continuously, for months. You knew every word and pause, every building crescendo, every staccato sounding word. Decades have now past - that same song that filled your every day has only passed your ears a dozen times since then, but it begins to play on a radio station. Before your kids can flip the station, your hand freezes their motion. There you are again, decades later, singing every word in sync with the artist. But how do you remember it all?

I honestly think music and rhyme play a big part of the memorization - that poem, that song...it is the rhythm and rhyme that catch, crocheting of lyrics into the recesses of memory, easily pulled out, like a loose string from fabric.

Now to sanitize that plunger, just in case star wars calls for another saber fight!

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