Strange and wonderful how the mind and memory work.
Beautiful early fall morning here, clear blue skies, the gentlest of breezes, temperature barely topping 65. Apple picking weather, the first of the season. So what are the sixteen year old and I doing this fine day? Disturbing the peace and quiet of the neighborhood by running the lawn mower.
For the record, it’s quarter of eleven and we just got started and I’ve checked with the experts on suburban etiquette on this. They’ve all assured me that it is not a violation of good neighborliness to mow your lawn on a Sunday morning as long as you don’t do it before ten. I usually wait until after one but my apprentice was anxious to get to it as soon as possible so he didn’t have that chore weighing on his mind all morning and I thought I’d better take advantage of this spasm of ambition and put him to work.
He and I trade off and I just finished off the front lawn and handed over the mower to him so he can start on the back yard. And while I was taking my turn, I noticed something I’ve noticed a few times before---like every time I’ve mowed the lawn since the end of the summer of 2004, our first summer in this house.
Sections of the lawn are now dedicated to the memories of great detectives.
The strip by the fence along the street side of the backyard? That belongs to Travis Magee. The patch above the culvert off to the side of the garage? Lord Peter Wimsey. The middle sections of the backyard and around the pool belong to Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. And there’s one small area where I have to mow around the stop sign at the corner where I always think of Stephanie Plum who also owns the grass growing around the swing set and behind the shed.
Up by the steps to our deck belongs to John Dortmunder, who of course is not a detective, he’s a thief, but I don’t hold that against him and neither does my insistent and peculiar memory.
Because what they all have in common isn’t their jobs but their lively existence as characters in books I happened to be listening to on tape on days when I had to mow the lawn that summer.
I’ve always enjoyed listening to recorded books but in 2004 I was addicted to it. It got to the point that I had stopped reading with my eyes and was doing all my reading with my ears. And I read like this everywhere. When I was out for a walk, when I was in the car, when I was alone for any length of time in the house, when I was doing chores. I even read---listened---myself to sleep. The only reason I kicked the habit is that my Walkman finally died and I couldn’t find a comfortable carrier for my portable CD player. If I ever get an iPod or a smart phone I could get hooked again easily. I recommend recorded books, especially to parents and caretakers of children who get restless on long car rides. I haven’t gone cold turkey either. We still listen to books on our long car rides. I’ll tell you something. All those Terry Pratchett novels I’ve read and pushed at you? I’ve actually only read three of them. All the rest I’ve listened to and then gone back to the paper texts to re-read selected passages. Still, back in 2004, it was maybe getting a little out of control.
It wasn’t just mysteries and thrillers. It was just the case that when I mowed the lawn I almost always chose a mystery or a thriller to read while I was doing it, mainly because it was hard to hear over the mower even with the volume turned all the way up and, as mindless a chore as mowing the lawn is, there are times when you have to focus in order to avoid mowing down the gladiolas or running over toads and small rodents so I knew I was going to miss a lot as I mowed. I love a mystery, but you can miss a lot and still follow the story, unless it’s by Raymond Chandler, and you can’t follow his stories even when your attention’s riveted so it doesn’t matter. By the way, Elliott Gould does a terrific job reading the Marlowe stories. I tried listening to one of Patrick O’Brien’s novels once and I was lost before Lucky Jack Aubrey had cleared port.
So, that summer I read The Scarlet Ruse, Strong Poison, Prisoner's Base, Ten Big Ones , and Bad Habits, among others. And I’m not surprised that the memory of having read those books comes back when I’m out mowing the lawn. What’s curious to me is the way the memories of specific books come back at specific spots. After all, I mowed the whole lawn each time, so why should any of the books be associated with any single particular patch of grass? Why do I remember The Scarlet Ruse when I’m mowing by the fence and not around the pool? Why do I think of Strong Poison in the front yard but not in the back? Why does Dortmunder own the upper part of the lawn and Stephanie Plum the lower part?
Here’s something even curiouser to me. I don’t simply remember having listened to those books. What happens is that I start listening to them again.
I can hear them in my head.
They don’t come back word for word, but I can hear the voices---Darren McGavin’s Travis Magee, Ian Carmichael’s Lord Peter, Lorelei King as Stephanie Plum---and I know what passage they’re reading. I know where I am in the story. Which means that these parts of my yard aren’t just associated with particular books, they are associated with particular chapters. How and why can that be?
Sound and smell are more evocative than sight. They are more powerful memory triggers, at any rate. For good reason. Human brains have learned to be highly selective. We’d go crazy if every bit of visual data touched off a memory storm. We’d drive our cars off the road and mow down all the gladiolas as well. But what happens when I mow the lawn? Something is triggering memories of particular sounds. And whatever it is, it’s extremely localized. It could be that every little patch of lawn has its own peculiar smells, smells that mix with the gasoline fumes in unique ways to create a new smell that I only notice when I’m mowing the lawn, otherwise wouldn’t those memories come back any time I happened to walk around the yard? It could be that there are things I only see when I’m mowing those patches, that the way I have to look out as I maneuver there forces me to notice details that I normally overlook. It could be that it’s not a sight or a smell or a sound or a combination of those stimulii playing games with my brain. It could be muscle memory. It could be the specific ways I have to move when I mow these particular parts of the lawn. Sometimes we say we feel things in every fiber of our being. Could it be that we remember things in every fiber too?
These our questions for a neuroscientist or an assiduous Googler. I’m far from the first and don’t have time to be the second right now.
The sixteen year old has finished up out back. My turn to take over.
I wonder what books I’ll be reading this time.
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Related by triggered memories of past posts:
At least you get actual stories when you encounter those triggers in the landscape. Mine tend more to be reiterations of whatever random thought popped into my head the first time I saw them: Driving past the sign for Wayne County, my brain starts up "Wayne. Wayne County. John Wayne. Dwayne the bathtub, I'm dwowning! Oh hell, I'm thinking about John Wayne again. And that dumb joke. Wayne, Wayne, Wayne. How far is it until we're home again?"
Every. Damn. Time.
Posted by: Rana | Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 07:05 PM
Funny, I was just thinking about Travis Magee the other day, wondering if anyone still reads those books. My gosh, they are more sexist than a 1974 Playboy magazine, and they got more and more violent as the series progressed. More formulaic, too, which I suppose is pretty much the inevitable way of these things. Towards the end you could pretty much skip about a third of each book. This is my boat, I won it in a card game. This is my car, it is a pickup truck welded to a Rolls Royce. This is my pal the economist. This is how I make a martini. Let me recap a previous adventure or two. Oh my! A smoking hot babe is in trouble! I take my retirement in pieces, so I will emerge now, for my fee. Let me explain about my fee.
They are every comforting, in a way, at least until the corpse of someone who has been flayed alive is found. And I've always thought that Meyer's advice about hard choices-- do the thing you don't want to-- is pretty good.
Posted by: Bill Altreuter | Monday, September 21, 2009 at 09:03 AM
Good Lord.
I thought I was the only one. I thought it some residual vestage of OCD.
Some people do their thinking in the shower.
I've got a big ass lawn and a leeeetle beeety mower. The missus has never mowed the yard, so she blows off my pleas for a riding lawn mower. Leaves plenty of time to watch mental movie reruns of Joe Hill's American Ghosts in certain parts of the yard. A little Dexter Dreaming Darkly along the orchard line. When I mow without my iPod, my inner ear actually itches for the absence of the ear buds.
There's a little patch I don't mow. I leave a little cover for the rabbits instead of slaloming the pin oaks. That's where I always think about Derringer's journalistic hypocricy, for some reason. Odd, I know, but it's become a self-fufilling reflex.
Effin'.
Weird.
Srsly. Weird. I thought it was just me.
Posted by: Dutch | Monday, September 21, 2009 at 02:28 PM
Stephanie Plum? No, no, noooo. After the third book you can write the dialogue yourself.
The first four or five books of Lindsay Davis and her Roman informant are really amusing.
Let's stick with Terry Pratchett.
Posted by: kate | Monday, September 21, 2009 at 06:37 PM
An industrious use of time! I haven't ventured much into audiobooks, but I've certainly gotten the bug for old radio shows like Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, Nightbeat, and especially Suspense, which features some great adaptations from the likes of Cornell Woolrich and John Dickson Carr.
Posted by: Rob Hill | Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 10:22 AM
Bill, all the Magee books are still in print, so somebody must be reading them. I know exactly what you mean about the slide into formula and violence. I was trying to read all of them in order one summer in college. Then I hit The Green Ripper. I still like the books I liked, though, and Nancy Nall is another fan. Nance reads around the formula stuff to get at MacDonald's insights into how the world works.
Kate, I haven't actually read any of the Plum books. I've had them read to me by Lorelei King who's terrific and she covers up a lot of the flaws in the writing with her performances. And Nigel Planer, who reads most of the Pratchett books, is fantastic.
Dutch, I'm glad to know I'm not the only one either.
Posted by: Lance | Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 10:46 AM
The Coffee Trader by David Liss, read by John Lee, is a great one, as is Terror, by Dan Simmons, read by John Lee as well. Love me some audiobooks!
Posted by: Dan | Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 09:07 AM