by Nils Peterson
I
I was telling a joke the other day on Zoom before a fairly large audience and I was telling it pretty well, Swedish accent and all. It’s a joke I have told before and it’s usually well received. However, it requires the word tailgate for the punchline, and that word never came. I sort of hung there on the hook, on the punchline of my joke, dangling like a participle. Eventually someone figured out the word I was missing, finished my joke and we went on to the next teller.
Mostly the words are there on the end of my tongue when they are bid, but an old man’s memory has a will of its own. It will recall what it wants to recall, no longer a servant to the old man’s will. Once I wrote “…sometimes Memory’s the CEO of a corporation grown too large. The boys in the mailroom can’t keep up. Incoming and Outgoing bins overflow. Mail carts lose their letters as they plod from office to office.” Another image I’ve had is that of the word heroically setting off from a distant country maybe located at the base of the spine, but the journey is a heroic one, it’s riding a slow camel and must stop at oases on the way. No wonder it doesn’t arrive till tomorrow, which, of course, never comes.
I wrote the above paragraph yesterday. This morning I remembered that a few months ago I’d tried to tell the same joke and lost it at the same word. So, is there a reason why tailgate has chosen to remain elusive, declaring its independence, refusing to come when called? Maybe it’s joined some hidden cabal of words that no longer want to be biddable, though they’ll arrive sometimes when they feel like it. If I ever tell the joke again, I’m going to write the word down on paper before I set off. I’m sure it’s quite possible that I’ll know the word when I begin the joke, but by the punchline it might well have gone off on its own.
II
You old ones may remember when comic books had centerfolds? No, not pictures of naked ladies, but little jokes, letters, comments about this and that and sometimes poems. I think it the first poem I ever consciously tried to remember.
A sigh is just a breath of air
Coming from the heart,
But when it takes a southward course,
It’s usually called a _______.
Yes, that’s how it looked on the page. You, of course, filled in the blank.
Another thing. For years I sang with a madrigal group and we often sang “April is in My Mistress’ Face” and often I would introduce it with the anecdote from Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days in which the shy young tenor, asked to sing his part alone at rehearsal in front of the beautiful conductor and the giggling sopranos choked up remembering when Bill Swenson instead of “Within her bosom lies [sic] September,” sang “Within her bosom lies Bill Swenson.”
Another memory. Dad had given me a kit to make a crystal radio. Some of you may remember those, a simple device, a little lever with what they called a cat’s whisker that you had to feel around the crystal with until you found a station. Very inexact. You also needed some kind of metal connection for an antenna, a radiator was often used. I used the springs under my mattress which worked pretty well. You listened through primitive ear phones at the faint crackly distant program. The wonder of it was that no one else could hear it and when you shut your door at night, ostensibly to sleep, you could listen as long as you wanted to and no one knew. I’m remembering now “The Count of Monte Cristo” with its exciting introductory music that I learned later was from a piece by Leo Delibes. It was part of the introduction to classical music available when I was young. As was the Lone Ranger with its William Tell Overture. If you were really into it, you knew it was mixed in with a Liszt Prelude).
From The Paris Review
“The bookstore, and especially the used bookstore, is vanishing from New York City. Today there are a few, but there used to be a multitude of them, crammed between kitchen appliance shops and laundromats and thrift stores. They all had temperamental cats prowling their aisles and they all smelled wonderfully of what a team of chemists in London has called ‘a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.’ I miss terribly this stimulating fragrance, and the books that produce it, when it’s washed from the city for good.”
This “combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness” is one of the world’s great smells. I fear it is on its way into “The Land of the Lost,” (a radio show which came on every Saturday morning in which the young hero and heroine would go to seek something lost because it was where all lost things ended up) though my grandson told me of the strange smell at Shakespeare and Co in Paris which he visited a couple of weeks ago. It may be soon alone “to tell the tale.” There was such a bookstore when I came to San Jose, California just down the street from my school. Yes, long gone. Going upstairs was always an adventure because of all the books stacked on each side of each step, and when you got there the nervousness continued because of the sagging floor and the loaded leaning shelving.
(As I typed this, I remembered the pillows stuffed with pine needles one used to buy at resort places in New England, how the forest lingered in your bureau drawer for years, and how every once in a while, you could pull it out, inhale, and remember.) And yes, here a little tribute to remembering what is really important.
What I learned in fourth grade
dust dances in a sun-streak
Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years
real ink in your inkwell changes things
P.S.
so much
depends upon
a round hole
in your desk
fitted now
with well, ink,
and your
own pen
III
A few moments of fierce but fickle snow this March morning. I sat looking at it for a while, even writing about it in a notebook with a new kind of pen whose scratches I can almost read. It felt good to get words down in the old way and not having to turn away from what I wanted to write about to hen-pick at my computer. The slant of the falling snow tickled my memory. Here’s what it brought back.
what if a much of which of a wind
gives truth to the summer’s lie — ee cummings
How alive the world this light gray morning – trees with a November joy – a stout wind heads north and they’d like to join. One red leaf picks up stakes, let’s go, and hums to itself “Way Up North to Alaska” – joined above by a stretched out pterodactylish cloud. In between a seagull shows off doing wheelies. But now the trees across the street seem just to be enjoying the moment – stretching and twisting as if they were in an arboreal pilates class with a beloved instructor.
The still point in this blowing, turning world – a distant narrow protestanty church steeple poking up above and beyond the neighborhood 7-11 – church present, but invisible. My friend Memory, alive with a good aliveness this morning, sends me back:
I’m walking my dog down the street and see a red leaf on a tree being blown and into my mind comes a phrase from Coleridge’s “Christabel” a poem I haven’t read for 70 years,
The lone red leaf
the last of its clan
dances something something
as fast as it can
Maybe later the missing words will come back, but in the meanwhile I’m back, a sophomore in college in my survey of English Lit class and I can see the backs of the heads of Joanne, Betty, and Charlotte, and feel Dan Purdom sitting in the desk beside me. There’s Dorothy Darnell up front, our teacher, not much older than her students, doing her best. She’s checking to see if we’ve read the assignment. I haven’t, though I’m trying to catch up in class. That’s why I sit in the back row so I can skim through the book while hoping not to be called on. And then –
I’m back walking down the street waiting for my dog to go about his business. And now I’m sitting in my chair watching the wind giving “the truth to the summer’s lie.”
With the help of google – the quotation as it should be.
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.