(no subject)

I really need to write up something about my grandparents for the memorial next month. And I'm having a hard time getting started. So here are fragments:

All about food: in the house in Woods Hole, I remember Pepperidge Farm molasses bread, removed from the toaster with toast tongs. Portugese bread. Being asked if we wanted a glass of bitter lemon (I suppose they used it in a cocktail but I don't know what - we found some in the Kronig's on the Vineyard this summer and it's very bitter!) Being invited to have a "chocolate covered" (Eskimo pie) after dinner. Hamburger zucchini for dinner and the accompanying story of smart-mouthed Toby who when asked "do you want to sauce on top or beside" replied "underneath."

George I remember as a gentle man - when Toby told a story of him cursing at bad drivers on car trips I was so shocked! He was so intelligent and so intellectual in his approach to the world that I think he was a bit inscrutable to children. When I was perhaps 13 he asked me in all seriousness to explain to him what the appeal of rock music was - and really, he wanted a music theory/cultural theory answer, which I was unable to provide. (I could do better now, though I'm still not musical). He was impossible to defeat at scrabble, and threw awry a game of dictionary at Phoebe and Steve's in Brighton because he kept knowing every obscure word we could find in their weighty dictionary. (He is the coiner of a word in the OED - a scientific term - and right now I forget what it is - must ask Toby.) But not intelligent in a fierce or competitive way - more in an otherworldly, abstracted way. Yet, of course, very willing to roughhouse with small children. I feel remiss in my memories of him since so many are from after I came out from the darkness of adolescence, at which point his Parkinson's was pretty well advanced. I don't feel the adult me knew the fully functioning him.

Going to the beach, coming home wet and sticky with sand and sitting on a big plastic sheet in the back of George's Rabbit, then bathing in the big clawfoot tub. The magical day when we came home from the beach to a surprise birthday party (I was turning 4). Every time we went to the beach in August after that (our birthdays all early September) I wished for another party. Yellow cake, white frosting, gumdrops.

Thank you Oliver Sacks

I have wondered about this for many many years, asked the b.org hivemind once, and before that the Sayers list I frequented, two of the most erudite gatherings I have ever encountered, and nobody knew. And then Sacks just drops it in to his recent New Yorker essay:

"Sometimes, as one is falling asleep, there may be a massive, involuntary jerk - a myloconic jerk - of the body. Thogh such jerks are generated in primitive parts of the brain stem (they are, so to speak, brain-stem reflexes), and as such are without any intrinsic meaning or motive, they may be given meaning and context, turned into acts, by an instantly improvised dream. Thus the jerk may be associated with a dream of tripping, or stepping over a precipice, lunging forward to catch a ball, and so on. Such dreams may be extremely vivid, and have several "scenes." Subjectively, they appear to start before the jerk, and yet preumably the enitre dream mechanism is stimulated by the first, preconscious perception of the jerk. All of this elaborate restructuring of time occurs in a second or less."

My myloconic jerk dreams are usually stairs, occasionally stepping off a curb.

Also, in flea trivia, celebrity name-dropping division, I once served dinner to Oliver Sacks, when he lectured at my college. He asked what the fish on the plate was, and I had to go ask, and the cook said "molly molly" which I repeated, and Sacks looked perplexed then came up with "mahi mahi." And I felt dumb (I'd never heard of it.)