Editorial
Front Page - Friday, April 9, 2010
I Swear...
Unexpected reappearances
Vic Fleming
Maybe it’s a recent thing. Maybe it’s been happening for a long time. I cannot really say for sure.
What I’m talking about is this phenomenon whereby I am attending to one thing, paying attention for all I’m worth, when suddenly I realize that some memory from childhood has invaded and taken over for 5-10 seconds.
For instance, I was following the sermon in church last week when, from nowhere, came this recollection of an old episode of “I Love Lucy.”
Rev. Hancock was preaching on Mary Magdelene’s encounter with the risen Lord on Easter Sunday. He is a great preacher, and this was a fine sermon!
But, for reasons I cannot explain, my attention was diverted for a small fraction of a minute by images of Lucy Ricardo wrestling a large Italian woman in a vat of grapes at a vineyard.
On another recent occasion, someone was telling me an interesting story as we were driving down the road. And, for no reason apparent to my conscious mind, I lost 10 seconds of my friend’s story.
Those 10 seconds were filled with a memory from a vacation that my family took when I was 11 years old: my mother talking in her sleep while napping in the back seat of the car as my dad drove the New Jersey Turnpike.
Again, I was on the phone with a man from California who is planning a book tour through Arkansas this autumn. He was carefully going over various details of what he expected to be able to do in Little Rock.
But for six to seven seconds, I tuned him out completely and replayed the final seconds of a high school football game from 1968, kicking the extra point that won the Tupelo game, 21-20.
What’s up with this?
Do any of you readers experience anything similar? If so, I’d like to hear from you.
I’d like to think it’s not age-related, but that it’s been happening all my life. That’d be good news on three fronts:
First, since it would not be age-related at all, it would not be a negative to associate with getting older. Or to worry about for that same reason.
Second, since it’s been happening right along, but I am just now noticing it, that could mean that I am becoming more aware, rather than less aware, as time marches on.
Third … Well, I can’t remember the third point. I had it in mind just five minutes ago, before typing the last two paragraphs.
But, at least I remember that there was a third point. And have no qualms about admitting that I forgot it in a short period of time.
But, as I was trying just now to remember it, I saw in my mind’s eye that scene from “Dr. No” in which the evil professor is instructed by the movie’s villain to pick up a little cage that contains a deadly tarantula.
Why that scene came back to me, rather than the one in which the said arachnid awoke Bond in the middle of the night as it crawled up his torso, I cannot say.
But that’s good news, as well, for at least three reasons. Pardon me while I think those up.
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at judgevic@comcast.net.
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