Mental Blocks

There is perhaps no scientific mystery more profound than the operation of the vast neural network we call the human brain. I was reminded of this yet again this morning by my mental processes during my walk, which ran counter to the subtitle of this blog: my thoughts, far from being idle, were racing in circles like a hamster on a wheel. And what was I so furiously (and unproductively) thinking about? I was trying to remember something I know I know.

Failure to summon up elusive words and (especially) names is a phenomenon I would imagine is not unfamiliar to most of my readers. It can occur at any age but, as I need hardly point out, becomes more common as we grow older. What is such a mystery is why we can always remember so many things we don’t really need to know (what my father used to call “miscellaneous useless information”—what is now called “trivia”) and invariably forget certain things we do need (or want) to know. And why mnemonics seem to be futile in some really hard cases, since we can’t remember the mnemonics, either.

A couple of years ago I created a Word file named “Mental Blocks” and titled “Things I Keep Forgetting.” In it I record the names of people and things that stymie me. Now when my mind becomes fixated on one of my chronic unmemorables, I have a reference. In other cases, I can jog my memory by searching my hard drive or the Internet for the needed information. Unfortunately, when I am walking, the only hard drive I have access to is my own brain, which now has many bad sectors and broken links. So when something reminds me of one of those “things I keep forgetting,” I have no recourse until I get home.

If I can distract myself with other sights and thoughts and feelings, occasionally I can put the gears in neutral long enough for the sought-after name to float to the top of my head. But usually my mind just keeps spinning its wheels until I get home.

Today’s unmemorable was “Land Rover.” I don’t know why I even need to remember this, but from time to time I’ll realize that I can’t, and it will drive me crazy. The last time I experienced this, I actually remembered it before I got home (victory!), but today I had to admit defeat and go to a Web page where I knew I had referenced it. I’ve now added it to the Mental Blocks file for easier reference.

Corollary to this experience is the subject of word and thought association. If I am trying to remember the name of, say, a particular actress or a person in our community, I have a huge vague cloud of mental associations with that person, some of them difficult to put into words and many of them peculiar to my personal experience. She played this part in that movie (which I can clearly visualize, though I can’t remember the name of the role or the film), and she’s married to the actor who was in such-and-such television drama. Or she has two sons (whose names I don’t remember) who played in the high school marching band with my daughter, and her husband was a well-known psychiatrist with an unusual name that contributes to my confusion of this person with someone else, and her aunt [or perhaps it was her husband's aunt?] was my aunt’s longtime friend and neighbor, etc. Unfortunately, given the uniqueness of individual points of view, there is rarely any description I can come up with from which anyone else can recognize the person I’m describing. For actors, thank goodness for IMDb; for everything else, I’m pretty much on my own—which is why the latter-described person is the first entry in my Mental Blocks file!

Bad Day for Mouth Breathers

I actually walked twice today (more on that later), and the second time I was rather in a hurry, so perhaps I was walking more briskly than usual. In any case, I had picked up the pace enough to be panting slightly. As I zipped along, at one point I realized that only by virtue of exhaling (blowing) at just the right moment had I avoided getting a bug in my mouth.

I’m surprised, actually, that this hasn’t happened sooner. You see, it’s lovebug season here. In case your area of the country/world is mercifully free of these critters, let me introduce you. Lovebugs (Plecia nearctica), also known as honeymoon flies, telephone bugs, kissy bugs or double-headed bugs, are a variety of march flies, which you can read more about in Wikipedia. They appear in two “flights,” in April–May and August–September. Their distinguishing characteristic is that they appear almost exclusively in pairs. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t really copulate in the air; they just like to hold hands. According to an article in the Press-Register:

What we see is the cuddling before and after the copulating.

If you see the little black and orange flies swarming without mates, they’re males trying to pick up a date. The more sensible females are hanging out on leaves of plants and trees. When the swarm of males come by, the females jump into the mix and hope to find a mate.

Once they get together, lovebugs fall to the ground to discreetly copulate—the insect world’s version of “getting a room.” When you see them in the air, the male is entwined with his lover so another male can’t cut in until it’s time to move on.

In case this sounds harmless, the flies are an incredible nuisance, as their lives are brief and their end is sticky. If their corpses are not washed off cars and other surfaces quickly, their acidity can cause lasting damage. And they can pile up into a nasty mess wherever they are. Although individual flies live only four days, each season (“flight”) lasts five weeks, which can seem like an eternity.

I began this post on a jocular note but must conclude on a more serious one. It was not just “a bad day for mouth breathers” but a tragic day for some of our neighbors, which is the reason I walked twice today. On the radio this morning, the local news broadcast mentioned a house fire in our neighborhood, and when I headed out around 7:30 this morning, I thought I might see where it was. In fact, as soon as I turned the corner, I could smell the pungent aroma of incinerated house. When I saw a truck a block ahead spraying water, my heart leapt into my throat (to use an original phrase), as I feared that the burnt house might be the historic old house on the corner (the one where I saw the trumpet vine). Thank goodness it was not, and in fact the truck turned out to be a “water buffalo” watering the plants in the flower beds at the intersection.

As I reached the corner, however, I saw that a block of the cross street was blocked off. This did not surprise me, as I had already noted the unusual amount of traffic on our street, detoured from this main thoroughfare. The firemen were still on the scene, and the street and sidewalk were full of ash and water. I deviated from my usual route to walk past the house. It was a total loss. I hastened home to report this to my husband.

It was not a historic old home. In fact, it was a relatively new one, but a very tasteful one beautifully built in the vernacular style and much admired by us in the neighborhood. If it has been determined what caused the fire, I have not heard (one news source is attributing it to an “unattended barbecue grill”), but my husband did settle one question we had.

Last night, shortly after we had gone to bed, just as we were drifting off to sleep, about midnight, we were startled awake by a loud noise that, in our drowsy state, we could not identify. Nothing seemed to be wrong, so we went back to sleep. In talking with the firemen this morning, he learned that it had been an explosion: while the firemen were fighting the fire, an oxygen tank exploded. If we had gotten up and looked out our bedroom window, we could probably have seen tongues of flame and clouds of smoke above the trees and houses between us and the burning house two short blocks away. But we didn’t.

At any rate, my first walk was quite short—only ten minutes. Later I went back out and did the full circuit. By this time an ATF agent was clearing the barricades to open the street to traffic again, and the disaster had attracted quite a few rubberneckers. Still later I saw a local TV news van on the scene, and of course it will be a big story.

Paving Paradise

The city where I live is a popular tourist destination, and this whole area is a favorite winter residence for “snowbirds,” mostly from the Midwest. Although the winter visitors tend to fill up the condos in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach (the two cities that share “Pleasure Island”), there is still a need for lodging for guests here as well. Fairhope used to have a hotel (the Colonial Inn) fairly close to town, and one of the large houses in town used to be a boarding house, but the Colonial Inn burned down, and the boarding house is now a private residence. Another home used to be a bed-and-breakfast inn, and another still is. An old-fashioned strip motel hangs on at the southern edge of town, and one of the town’s most distinctive landmarks has also been converted into a guest house.

But the new, modern hotels (Key West Inn, Holiday Inn Express) are farther from town, along Highway 98, which bypasses downtown, and many people who visit here want to stay downtown. So one of our enterprising developers is building a Hampton Inn downtown. This has been a somewhat controversial venture (it’s three stories tall in a downtown area that until recently was composed almost entirely of one- and two-story buildings). And it will require parking, which is always at a premium downtown. So the builder offered to build, in conjunction with the hotel, a parking garage that would not only provide parking spaces reserved for hotel guests but also add more public parking spaces than were currently provided by the surface lot it would replace. This seemed like a win-win proposition, and the city fathers approved.

The hotel building is going up nicely now and, with windows and their concomitant AC units installed, is looking quite like a hotel. And the first concrete pillars of the parking garage have now been erected as well. But before all this could appear above ground, considerable site preparation was required (including excavation that threatened a noble ancient tree, causing further controversy). Many cubic yards of soil had to be removed from the site and disposed of. In another win-win agreement, the builder made an arrangement with the county school system to dump the earth into a gully behind the K–1 Center, thereby preventing further erosion and providing more land area.

Each day as I walk through “the desert,” as my husband and I call this stretch of street behind the school (because there is virtually never any usable shade there on really hot days), I observe this reclamation project. For weeks I watched dump trucks bringing loads of dirt and dumping them into the seemingly insatiable maw of the gully. Then I watched bulldozers spreading the dirt and leveling the surface. Finally I saw that a carpet of straw had been spread over the new land. The straw, which contains (or covers) grass seed, is held together with biodegradable netting. The straw prevents the soil and seed from washing away, the netting prevents the straw from washing away, and presently there is tall grass, which is what I now see when I pass.

It seems quite marvelous, but I wonder how long the grass will survive. As I mentioned, parking is at a premium near downtown, and this new land area is bordered on two sides by existing parking, recently resurfaced. Most of the existing parking spaces are currently unused most of the time: they serve the school (which will be partially closing within a year or so when the first grade moves to a new elementary school, leaving only the kindergarten) and the classrooms of a portion of the Fairhope campus of the University of South Alabama (which has facilities scattered all over town). The only time all the parking spaces in town are sure to be filled—with campers and motor homes as well as cars and trucks—is during Arts & Crafts weekend, which brings artists and tourists from around the country to our town for three days.

The town is trying to be environmentally responsible. A number of experiments with pervious concrete and permeable and porous pavers have been successful, and one can only hope that, if this reclaimed land is ultimately paved, some such method will be used.

Walking Some, Not Thinking Much

Anyone who is still following this blog will have noticed I haven’t posted much lately. Partly that reflects the fact that I haven’t been walking as much (several rainy days), and partly it’s due to time pressure—too much other work to be done. But the primary factor is that I haven’t been thinking any thoughts worth sharing. Some days I’m preoccupied with all the tasks I have to accomplish during the day. Other days I’m puzzling about the meaning of a really strange dream (seems like I’ve had a lot of those lately). One day I was distracted by a sore toe (my husband put together some new bookcases, and when I was helping him move them—barefooted—the bookcase moved faster than my foot and ended up jamming my right big toe). Another day I was worried because I got out to the street and couldn’t remember how to start my stopwatch: I kept pushing all the wrong buttons, and so of course I started fretting that I was losing it; after all, they say the Alzheimer’s sufferer is the last to know! This sort of mood is not conducive to very productive thinking.

The weather is certainly conducive to walking these days, though, with cooler temperatures and frequently a nice breeze, especially last Friday, which was quite gusty all day as we got a little activity from the far outer bands of Hurricane Ike. It’s beginning to be good weather for opening the windows—an option that will not be open to some of my neighbors who are still boarded up or shuttered against possible hurricanes. Although the hurricane season doesn’t technically end till the end of November (and we can hardly forget the 2005 season, when they just kept on coming through the end of December, using up the alphabet and going “on beyond zebra” to Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Zeta before they were done), and I can understand why a homeowner would not want to haul out an extension ladder to take down plywood or open shutters on the second floor of a house, I do have to wonder whether these folks are out of town or if they’re really living in a cave inside those boarded-up houses.

Well, I’m obviously just rambling. Perhaps tomorrow I can get back to thinking!

Wall-climbing Squirrels

The other day when I was walking, I saw something I’d never seen before and almost couldn’t believe: a squirrel scurrying across the front face of a neighbor’s stucco house. When I told my husband, he was equally amazed, and the members of my ballet class were so incredulous that I almost began to doubt the evidence of my own eyes.

How could this be, I wondered? Squirrels, although they can climb the rough bark of trees, don’t have claws like cats. My ballet instructor, who has had pet squirrels, confirmed that their claws are more like those of a dog or rabbit (some online research indicates that they can get quite sharp, however). And they certainly don’t have adhesive pads like a lizard.

I still don’t know how it’s possible, but a Google search for “squirrel climbing wall” turns up plenty of video evidence of this phenomenon. Judging from this evidence, it is rare enough to surprise those who see it: many of the observers were startled into rather profane utterances, making most of the videos unsuitable for viewing by those with tender ears. Indeed, given the evident rarity of the sight, it’s interesting that so many observers happened to have a video camera handy. But all of them immediately realized they were seeing something unusual. One even commented that the sight was “definitely YouTube quality.” Several described the squirrel as “crazy” or “daft,” and there were inevitable allusions to Spiderman.

The bottom line, though, is that squirrels do seem to be able to navigate across vertical brick, stucco, and rough concrete surfaces, but they do it infrequently enough to surprise people when they do it. Here are some of the best of the videos I turned up:

This is the first one I found. The photographer is audibly amazed (and envious).

This one is very poor video quality but definitely shows the squirrel in rapid motion.

The photographer who filmed this one was evidently intrigued with the squirrel’s “barking,” and you have to watch the video for some time before the squirrel moves, but when it does, it’s pretty impressive.

I think the wall in this one is concrete or stucco, but it could conceivably be some rough wood product.

Very poor-quality video, and again rather slow starting, but impressive movement nonetheless.

This squirrel got the dog’s attention!

This one is more like climbing a tree, since the squirrel is climbing up the corner of the house rather than a flat face, but it’s still impressive.

Dotage

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had a birthday last week. Apparently it has made me not just older but actually a doddering idiot.

I received a number of birthday cards. Given the uncertainty of the mails, the senders had posted them at varying times in an attempt to reach me on The Day. One client who was going out of town sent his a week early. Others were received the day before, the day after, or even later. All were appreciated, but the one I received today resulted in some consternation.

It was from my brother in Cincinnati, mailed the day before my birthday. It was, as usual, funny (he always finds the funniest cards—must have a secret source). It made humorous reference to the forgetfulness of old age, and I was about to email him to say that apparently he was so forgetful that he had forgotten he’d already sent me a card, received the day before my birthday.

But when I went to get that card, I discovered that it was not from my brother at all but from someone entirely different!

I am entirely unable to account for my thinking it was from my brother. The return address is clearly Mobile, not Cincinnati, and the handwriting is entirely different from his. Moreover, unlike his usual cards, this one was not funny, a fact which I noted with some surprise. Apparently that surprise so threw me that I didn’t even read the signature on the card.

I find this whole experience unfathomable. It would have some deep psychological implications about the power of expectations to cloud one’s objectivity if there had been any reason for me to expect that this card was from that particular brother as opposed to one of the others, or from anyone else in the world, but there was no reason to expect that. So the only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that I am becoming senile. Stay tuned for further deterioration!

Aging and Relativity

Today I am nominally a year older. I don’t think I feel any older, but there are certainly times when I feel OLD! I hope I don’t look as old as I feel physically, but I’m pretty sure I look older than I feel mentally.

It is axiomatic that old age, like the mountains in the distance when you’re driving toward them, retreats as you approach it. Thirty-year-olds seem ancient to teenagers, but you can be heading into your sixties without having been willing to acknowledge that you have reached “middle age.” Similarly, it is by no means original to remark that, the older you get, the younger young people look. What concerns me these days is that I no longer seem to be able to very accurately judge people’s ages relative to mine. I do pretty well if they are very much younger or older, but if they are close in age, I tend to misjudge most of the time. I am often surprised to learn that people I thought were older than I are actually the same age or younger.

Obviously, I no longer know what I look like. This is not surprising. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at myself. But I also don’t spend a lot of time looking at my husband; after all, I know what he looks like. (Perhaps he doesn’t really look at me, either, which could be why he still thinks he likes my looks.) I suspect this is universal: we never really look at the people we know best, especially if we are with them all the time. It is when we encounter people we haven’t seen in a long time that we are shocked by how much they have aged (and they’re probably thinking the same about us).

In most cases, though, we still recognize them, presumably because we are relating to something deeper than appearance. My mother, who lived to be 86, could have been said to be “old before her time,” at least physically. Despite her unusually youthful appearance, she had been afflicted with arthritis in her knees from a relatively early age and ultimately was quite crippled by it. Two knee replacements helped, but by the time she had the second one, the heart murmur she’d had since her teens had begun to slow her down, and osteoporosis (partly resulting from acquired lactose intolerance) had deformed her posture. She’d been plagued by psoriasis all her life, and, like her mother, she had become increasingly deaf, again beginning at a relatively early age. So she struggled with multiple handicaps and trials. Yet she often remarked that the most cruel part of aging was that she didn’t feel any different inside—in her heart she was still a teenager.

I don’t entirely agree. Although I still have most of the same faults I had as a teenager, I hope I have gained a little control over some of them. Although I may not have retained all the knowledge I had in college, I hope I have acquired at least a little wisdom and experience.

And there are compensations for being and/or looking “old.” You are sometimes treated with increased respect—not always welcome: I don’t know which surprised me more, being called “ma’am” for the first time or being addressed as “miss” when I was very obviously pregnant with my first child! I’ve gotten used to being called “ma’am,” but I’m still insulted if someone gets up to give me a seat (no matter how grateful I may be).

One of the greatest compensations for growing old, I’m told, is grandchildren, and I guess I will soon find out, as I have learned I’m to become a grandmother next spring. I suspect the experience may be as transformative as having children was (I’m not ga-ga yet, but I’ve been assured this comes naturally), and I look forward to finding out.

Goodbye, Gustav

Yesterday my brother in Japan emailed me to say that he’d been following my blog to find out whether he needed to be worried about us with regard to Gustav. “If you don’t post tomorrow, of course, I will assume the worst!” he wrote. In my reply, I pointed out that if I couldn’t walk, I’d have nothing (theoretically) to post about.

Indeed, I haven’t walked today, and although I have postponed posting until it seemed the storm was “over,” Gustav has not provided much fodder one way or another. As expected, its effects were felt mostly west of here, and fortunately New Orleans seems to have been spared the brunt of it, and even Morgan City, Louisiana, doesn’t seem to have been brutally impacted by the storm, which had been downgraded to Category 2 by the time it made landfall around midday today.

Here we’ve had some wind and some rain. My husband just emptied the rain gauge; it was filled up to the last calibration mark, which is at 5″, so we have already gotten more rain than from T.D. Fay. As for the wind, we have no anemometer, but my husband’s criterion is the number of “giblets” of oak tree we have blown down in the back yard—bunches of foliage torn off by the wind. Even an ordinary heavy rain will bring down dead wood, but it takes a pretty strong wind to rip off these small branches of live foliage, and there are essentially none today.

We were very aware of the rain “bands.” Although I’d hoped for a rainy, windy night (good for sleeping), the first rain arrived about 6 a.m. It has continued off and on all day. Whenever it cleared enough to encourage us to go out for a walk (me) or run (my husband), we would turn around and find it raining again, often with heavy rain blown sideways by the wind. So I haven’t been out, even to reconnoiter (I suppose I could go out in the car, but that seems like cheating).

I haven’t done much else, either. The worst thing about these storms is the combination of restlessness and lethargy they engender. This is especially noticeable when there’s an actual threat. And of course when we lose power, there’s an excuse for goofing off. I’ve had no such excuse today, yet I’ve still accomplished little. Admittedly, it’s a holiday (Labor Day in the United States), but that doesn’t mean I don’t have work to do. Since I’m also a procrastinator of the first rank, however, I’ve managed to rationalize putting it off till tomorrow (it helps that I did a lot of tomorrow’s work yesterday, in a fit of similar restlessness).

I should mention that the effects of the storm have not been entirely unnoticeable here. Some of the effects that we would really not have predicted were these:

1.    It being the end of the month, my husband made it a point to write checks to pay all the bills before we went out for milk yesterday so we could take them to the post office on the way (even though we know they won’t go out till Tuesday, it seemed prudent to get them that far while we could). When we got there (about 2 p.m.), we found the post office lobby closed. I suspect the USPS will get some uncomfortable feedback from boxholders who couldn’t access their post office boxes because the post office had been secured against the storm.

2.    At 2 p.m. yesterday, our local public radio station stopped playing classical music and switched over to the audio feed from the local television station with which they partner (which of course had preempted all regular programming in order to cover the storm). Since all listeners within their broadcast area surely still had power and could have gotten this same audio and video from the television station itself, this seemed like overkill. Presumably WHIL had to let their staff go, but this was just insane.

3.    Coverage of the storm on the Weather Channel was interrupted by the “morons” (my husband’s term) at our local cable system, who broke into useful programming to put up DOS-style screens announcing local tornado warnings (instead of just using a crawl at the bottom of the screen).

Well, I guess that’s it from here for now—back to normal tomorrow!