Madia Gracilis, Slender Tarweed

Day 334: Every year after you reach a certain age, you will be required to have an "annual wellness check" in order to satisfy Medicare. The whole process is demeaning and ridiculous. It is meant to test your cognitive functions, although if you told them you were Napoleon Bonaparte and the year was 1066 AD and you were living in Australia, I'm not exactly sure what they could do about it except inform your family that you might not be too firmly attached. In my case, I have no family, so unless I was to go streaking starkers down the centerline of the highway yelling "I am a rutabaga," they'd have no recourse.

I pride myself on my memory. After all, I have to remember complex weaving patterns which are sometimes long strings of numbers. While not as essential in the short term, remembering plant names is also important, and for me, that means the Latin. I may not always get the species correct (and certainly not if it's something I'll need to research to distinguish it), but I'm good with genera, even though it sometimes takes me a while to filter through the cotton wool to get down to the data levels in my head. I had a quarter mile to go to get back to my car after photographing this weed, but by the time I reached the parking area, I was saying, "Madia. Not exigua, something else." All things considered, that wasn't bad. I don't think I'd ever noticed this species before even though it's a fairly common weed. A quick check of the books at home told me it was Madia gracilis, Slender Tarweed.

If that's not proof of a good memory, I challenge you to find a better. It's certainly more of a mental exercise than this year's entree at the doctor's office when I was asked to remember "dog, cat, mouse" for ten minutes.

Pink Thing On The Bald

Day 238: About half a mile in, the Rimrocks trail begins a short, slow climb which opens out into a bald covering roughly 1200 square feet. The soil is thin, bedrock showing through in several places, and yet it supports a small plant I've seen nowhere else. One of yesterday's goals was to see if "the pink thing on the bald" was in bloom. Pink thing? I was scraping my memory for the name. As I came up the incline and a pink haze of four-inch tall flower stalks came into view, I said aloud, "Plectritis? Hmmm...now why did that word spring to mind? Plectritis? I'm not sure that's right, but why am I thinking it?" I took the requisite pictures for a Penny Perspective, and then kept going, muttering "Plectritis?" to myself every now and then until I had reached my chosen turn-around a mile further on. The climb to the top of the bald is steeper coming back the other way, although still very short, and as I mounted it, the words "Plectritis congesta" fell from my lips. Even so, I still wasn't convinced that the Latin applied to this particular plant, but when I got home, it was a simple matter to verify that my aging memory was indeed intact by checking my blog. It's been three years since I had to pull those words out of my mental database. Known commonly as Sea-blush, what's this species doing so far inland?

Memory

Day 168: The human brain is a strange and sometimes unpredictable organ. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are 14-16 billion neurons, each neuron connected to thousands of others by synapses. A synapse can be compared to a light switch. It has two positions, "on" and "off." Until stimulated, a synapse remains open, i.e., unconnected, "off." When it closes (picture a lightbulb over a head here if you so desire), the light comes on. Now whether or not these synapses have anything to do with conscious thought has been the subject of much discussion over the years and nothing has been proven one way or the other; I choose to think it does. In fact, I'm sure I can feel my synapses springing open and snapping closed even as I write this post. That said, I am also aware that some of them are pretty rusty, and there are a few I'm sure will never swing on their hinges again. However, one of them surprised me in the night, and in the process, it triggered several more which had gone at least fifty years without functioning.

When I was attending fifth grade at a parochial school, the boredom of the classroom was broken by rare and precious visits from a drama teacher. She instructed us in the correct posture for reciting poetry (girls with their hands held at waist level, one resting in the other, boys with their hands behind their backs at "parade rest"), and introduced us to Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" with the injuction to revise the last line to use "men" in place of the rude word "fools." She intended also to have us put on a play, somethingornaother "Fan" which I believe she may have authored (it was certainly not Oscar Wilde!). I won the part of the washerwoman/cook when I read it with a Cockney accent. However, something unfortunate occurred before we could present it before the school, and the drama teacher disappeared without explanation. The play might have been "The Golden Fan" or "My Lady's Fan" or some such (I've been unable to locate it under either of those titles), but the drama teacher...the drama teacher...what was her name? Apropos of absolutely nothing, I rolled over in bed at 3:30 AM this morning and said, "Mrs. Manx!"

Tell me where that came from. I was awake, as I often am in the pre-dawn hours, debating whether I should get up or not, and I had not been thinking about the play or the school or anything else which might have caused that particular synapse to snap shut. I swear you could have heard it clank if you'd been standing beside my bed. And another followed it: "Mr. MacKenzie!" He was my fifth-grade teacher, another name which had fled my memory by the time I was twenty. But why now? Why did these two names leap into my head without preamble? Admittedly, my best thinking is done while I'm horizontal. I've been aware of that since I was very young indeed. And should I have a brainstorm in the night and sit up to write it down, the verbalization vaporizes before I can lay hands on a pen. Yes, the brain is a funny organ indeed, and mine apparently has some shelves in sore need of dusting. Who knows what other treasures I might find in its corners?