“If you could read my mind, love…”

 —Gordon Lightfoot

My wife and I were once befriended by a retired professional hypnotist from New York City. And when I say professional, I mean really professional: he wasn’t one of those fun, on-stage-showmen hypnotists that’ll turn you into a clucking, seed-pecking “chicken” for laughs and a quick buck. No, this gentleman’s distinguished career as a clinical hypnotherapist had him working in New York City hospitals and within the NYC criminal justice system.

During a high school assembly (at a high school where I was teaching), he shared this one famous, historical anecdote that really threw a monkey wrench into all that I thought I knew about the inner workings of the human brain:

A woman lay on a hospital operating table. Although her brain was surgically exposed to the open air, she remained in no pain, wide awake, aware, and perfectly capable of conversing with her surgeons during the procedure.

 

Using a small probe designed to produce the mildest of electric stimulations when applied to chosen areas of the brain, one of her surgeons gently stimulated a random spot on hers. Immediately her face looked perplexed. When asked what she was experiencing, she replied, “Why, I just suddenly tasted a ham sandwich.” Further into the operation, the doctor once again applied the probe to another random location. Suddenly the woman was beaming happily. When asked to explain, she told the surgeon, “I was suddenly just sitting in a concert hall with my mother, but it was back when I was a child. And the music? It’s wonderful!”

To me this begged a lot of questions, not the least of which is… What sensations or memories might be tapped into if you, or I, were the patient lying on that operating table? I find this so intriguing.

 

Now, the above example has much to do with the overall behind-the-scenes theme of this many-episodes blog that you’re reading. As I attempted to explain in my very first post, lots of random memories are suddenly reawakening (popping up) in my 77 year old consciousness seemingly all the time now. And while some are the longer “story”-memories with their pretty convoluted plot lines (like my recent Gizmo Chronicles), so many more of them are just simpler “moments”-memories, little unimportant-yet-interesting moments that have been leaving me amazed at the beyond-incredible capacity of my brain to have catalogued so much of the minute-by-trivial-minute minutiae of my relatively long life.

 

Check out what this cool dude had to say about this:

NOTHING IS LOST

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told 
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes 
Of all the music we have ever heard 
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken, 
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled, 
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes 
Each sentimental souvenir and token 
Everything seen, experienced, each word 
Addressed to us in infancy, before 
We could even know or understand 
The implications of our wonderland.

There they all are, the legendary lies 
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears 
Forgotten debris of forgotten years 
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise 
Before our world dissolves before our eyes 
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder, 
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent 
An echo from the past when, innocent 
We looked upon the present with delight 
And doubted not the future would be kinder 
And never knew the loneliness of night.

—Noel Coward (1899 – 1973)

Fascinating, no…?

As part of the Characterization portion of my high school English Creative Writing units, I often would ask my little writers, “Can you imagine having a ballpoint-pen-sized instrument which, when you secretly positioned it right behind the ear of the kid sitting in front of you, could download and reveal all their thoughts and memories?” My point was this: the interesting and well-written character sketches in literature need to go way beyond the mere standard mugshot-stats of height, weight, color of eyes, and color of hair. The kid sitting in front of you may appear outwardly boring and uninteresting at a glance, but once you peel back their scalp and take a peek inside that brain… SURPRISE! People are usually a lot more interesting that we may be led to believe.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK. I’m going to tell you a little story here, a bed-time story if you will. It’s not a great story or even an important one. Nope, no little Stephen King blockbuster here (although you may find that there is just a whiff of Stephen King-ishness about it). It’s a silly story, actually.  But the thing to remember is… it’s a true one. And it describes one of the little “moments” that has recently just “bubbled up” to the surface of  my  dark and murky subconscious memories… almost as if, say, a brain surgeon had just pressed his electronic probe on just the right spot of my brain…

WEST OF THE WALL

So it’s late June, 1964. A beautiful, blue-sky, sunny morning. I’m at work downtown. Three weeks ago, I graduated from high school and now I’m earning the Big Bucks for college— to the tune of $46 dollars a week take-home pay at Huey Cole’s Esso station. Don’t laugh. $46.00 a week is fair pay for a kid my age.

Coles’ Esso, 20 years before I started working there.

At this point in my on-the-job training life, I’velearned almost just enough about grease-monkeying to be seriously dangerous, but fortunately that won’t be an issue today. Because we’ve got the full-time crew on deck tohandle the grease jobs, oil changes, and whatever else. Me? I’m strictly the gas pump jockey. All day long. Easy street.

Well, easy except for the fact that we’re a full-service gas station, meaning that on top of pumping the gas, I also get to wash the windshields, check the customers’ oil, check the air pressure in all four tires, and make sure the distilled water in the batteries is properly topped off. And that’s OK, but… there’s a couple of old ladies (old bags) who roll in here once a week and (if you can believe this) actually make me climb right inside their smelly old car and wash all of their inside windows! On top of all the other stuff! I mean, cripes, have they got a lot of nerve, or what!? It’s crazy, and believe me I’ve complained to the boss about it!

But he tells me they’re the customer, and the customer is always right so I’d better do it and do it with a smile!

Pugs were the standard old bags’ dogs of choice back then.

I tell him OK, I’ll do it, but it’d be one hell of a lot easier to smile if that nasty little pug of theirs in the back seat would just stop snarling and nipping at my ankles, for chrissakes!

But hey, in the downtime at the station, which there’s usually lots of (our town being a regular Gomer and Goober Pyle Mayberry, R.F.D.), I’ll be lazing much of the day away slouched in the boss’s swivel chair, feet up on the desk, manning the phone, smoking cigarettes, and listening to my favorite station, WGUY Bangor. Listening to the top 40 is just about everything to me, so thank God I’ve got a job where the radio plays all day long. Plus, I like sitting behind a big desk. I tell my buddies, yeah, I got me a desk job this summer.

Around 10:00, just as another new song is beginning to play, a Chevy wagon with a family of five pulls up at the pumps. I mash my filter-tip Kool into the ash tray and head out. It’s a little annoying because I hadn’t caught the name of the new tune. All I’d picked up on is it was something about a wall. Oh well, whatever, I’m sure I’ll be hearing it again sometime. At some point down the road.

By the time I get to step back into the office and ring up the sale, there’s a bunch of commercials going on. But anyway, I slip back into the office chair, put my feet back up, and light up another cancer stick. And as always, keep a sharp eye on the pumps, lest my dad suddenly pulls in and catches me smoking. Sure. I know. I’m seventeen going on eighteen next month. An adult, right? But for some reason I’m just not ready to have that particular fight with the old man.

So, turns out the next song up on the radio is…

Huh! Hey, wait just a minute. That’s the same song as the last one, the one they just played. Which is pretty odd. I mean, they don’t usually play a tune twice in a row, back to back like this. But OK. Cool. I’ll take it. I wanted to hear it again anyway. Now I just don’t hafta wait till tomorrow or the next day. Which is great.

Surprisingly though, good ol’ DJ, Jack Dalton, seems to have forgotten to announce the title of the song. \Which is odd. Didn’t say anything at all, in fact. The song just started playing without even a word from him. But…  so what? Anybody with half a brain can guess the name of the song anyway. I mean, it’s gotta be “West of the Wall,” since that’s the phrase getting repeated over and over in the chorus.

It’s a girl’s voice doing the singing. She’s probably a real babe, like all of’em. Plus, it’s one of those melodies that gets stuck in your head right away, you know?

Hmmm. So, it’s about the Berlin Wall over in Germany.  About somebody on one side of the wall being separated from somebody else on the other side. Her lover obviously. It’s kinda sad. Like a Romeo and Juliet thing. I like sad songs.

But as it draws to the end, I’m focusing right in on it because I really want the title and artist’s name spoken. I still keep my little notebook at home, under my bed next to my radio, where I keep track of new titles and artists and where they’ve currently landed in the top 100. See? But that’s me. Obsessive-compulsive.

OK, now here’s something really odd. The song just came to the end, right? But then, it just simply  started re-playing all over once again. For the third time! And still, not a word from the DJ. Not a word from anybody! So… what gives?

A kind of wild idea pops into my head. Maybe the DJ is the only one at the studio. For some reason, who knows why, he’s gotten stuck working alone today. And… guess what: he’s had himself a little emergency. As in… nature calls. Stuck in the bathroom! Maybe… probably, with a real bad case of the runs, or something. If so, man, wouldn’t I hate to be him! I mean, how awful would that be!? Not to mention embarrassing! You know, you’ve got this job to do. And your boss… not to mention all your listeners out there in radio land… are counting on you to continue their hit parade, but there you are, stuck behind a bathroom door and glued onto the porcelain throne, sweating like a pig, and praying desperately you’ll somehow be able to get back out there to that goddamn microphone. To crawl back if you have to! Anyway, can’t wait to hear his excuse when he finally does come back on the air. I mean, jeez, what would I say in a situation like that? Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but… see, there was this uhmmm… really insistent payola thug at the door practically threatening to kneecap me if I refused to play his client’s demo? Or… man, I was having this vicious nicotine fit, so I just stepped outside for a couple of drags when… all of a sudden… the wind just slammed the door shutbehind me! And it locked!

Yeah. Poor guy, stuck in the john right now and be going through a dozen possible alibis.

Ah! Here it comes… the song is ending.

Silence.

And then… the song just starts right up again! WHAT the…? Something’s going on… but…

Of course a car rolls up to the pumps. Followed by another. Damn it.

And of course the song is still playing when I return to the cash register. My God, a few more plays and I’ll have all the damn lyrics memorized, right down pat.

But wait a minute! What if this is something a lot more serious? Like, oh I dunno, did he have a heart attack or something? Yeah, and what if he’s just lying there on the floor unconscious? Or even DEAD? Holy crap! And what if this guy is obese? And what if, say… his three hundred and fifty pound body is lying there accidentally barricading the door like a human doorstop, so nobody can get in to help him?

Oh, for cryin’ out loud, would you listen to yourself. I mean, I really know the odds are that nothing that exotic, nothing that serious, is gonna turn out being responsible for the simple, never-ending replaying of “West of the Wall,” if that’s what the song actually is called.

Probably the poor soul really is suffering a bathroom emergency.

Still though, the song goes on. And on. For three hours, which includes my lunch break.

Meanwhile, I’ve been sharing what’s been going on with this phantom broadcast with my co-workers and even some of our customers who’ve stepped into the office. Got’em all scratching their heads for a minute or two. But they’re too busy to care, really. Their attitude? Yeah? So what?

So… I must bear this burden alone.

But for me, at this stage of the game, whatever it is going on here, it’s created kind of an electric, festive atmosphere. Spooky. I’ve kinda feeling this creepy 1938 War of the World’s broadcast feeling. Something right out of The Twilight Zone. You know, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” kinda vibe.

 

And by now, after all this time, I really do hafta be thinking, OK, there’s really gotta be at least a… somewhat unusual explanation for this. For  something as bizarre as this.

Time ticks itself away…

Then…

Sometime in the late afternoon, close to the end of my shift, the music…

stops! Stops dead!

And suddenly… nothing but radio silence.

Frozen stock-still, I’m now gawking at the little radio on the shelf as if it were a TV screen.

Something’s happened! And it’s about time! But OK… what?!

I wait…

And WHOA! Suddenly the radio silence is broken by a crisp announcer’s jarring voice, loudly clearing his throat in a no-nonsense, this-is-serious kind of way. As if whatever it is he’s about to say will be a very grave news bulletin! Oh. My. God. I can’t help it! This is big! I’m all lik… have the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor again? Have the Russians invaded us? Has another President been shot? Have the monsters blasted Maple Street right off the frickin’ map? WHAT!?

At long last, a man who is not the DJ launches right into it. And all of us,meaning the vast, entire WGUY radio listening audience everywhere, is finallygoing to clue us in. He says, “I’m sorry to report…

 

He’s giving us the lowdown. And the lowdown is… kind of incredible.

END OF STORY

Thanks for reading. Please keep a vigilant eye out for the rest of this TRUE STORY, “West of the Wall; The Epilogue,” due to appear on your favorite device’s screen at any moment now…

One of many TIME CAPSULE MOMENTS in my brain.

“If you could read my mind, Love…”—

My wife and I were once befriended by a retired professional hypnotist from New York City. And when I say professional, I mean really professional: he wasn’t one of those fun, on-stage-showmen hypnotists that’ll turn you into a clucking, seed-pecking “chicken” for laughs and a quick buck. No, this gentleman’s distinguished career as a clinical hypnotherapist had him working in New York City hospitals and within the NYC criminal justice system.

During a high school assembly (at a high school where I was teaching), he shared this one famous, historical anecdote that really threw a monkey wrench into all that I thought I knew about the inner workings of the human brain:

A woman lay on a hospital operating table. Although her brain was surgically exposed to the open air, she remained in no pain, wide awake, aware, and perfectly capable of conversing with her surgeons during the procedure. Using a small probe designed to produce the mildest of electric stimulations when applied to chosen areas of the brain, one of her surgeons gently stimulated a random spot on hers. Immediately her face looked perplexed. When asked what she was experiencing, she replied, “Why, I just suddenly tasted a ham sandwich.” Further into the operation, the doctor once again applied the probe to another random location. Suddenly the woman was beaming happily. When asked to explain, she told the surgeon, “I was suddenly just sitting in a concert hall with my mother, but it was back when I was a child. And the music? It’s wonderful!”

To me this begged a lot of questions, not the least of which is… What sensations or memories might be tapped into if you, or I, were the patient lying on that operating table? I find this so intriguing.

Now, the above example has much to do with the overall behind-the-scenes theme of this many-episodes blog that you’re reading. As I attempted to explain in my very first post, lots of random memories are suddenly reawakening (popping up) in my 77 year old consciousness seemingly all the time now. And while some are the longer “story”-memories with their pretty convoluted plot lines (like my recent Gizmo Chronicles), so many more of them are just simpler “moments”-memories, little unimportant-yet-interesting moments that have been leaving me amazed at the beyond-incredible capacity of my brain to have catalogued so much of the minute-by-trivial-minute minutiae of my relatively long life.

Check out what this cool dude had to say about this:

NOTHING IS LOST

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told 
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes 
Of all the music we have ever heard 
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken, 
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled, 
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes 
Each sentimental souvenir and token 
Everything seen, experienced, each word 
Addressed to us in infancy, before 
We could even know or understand 
The implications of our wonderland.

There they all are, the legendary lies 
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears 
Forgotten debris of forgotten years 
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise 
Before our world dissolves before our eyes 
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder, 
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent 
An echo from the past when, innocent 
We looked upon the present with delight 
And doubted not the future would be kinder 
And never knew the loneliness of night.

—Noel Coward (1899 – 1973)

Fascinating, no…?

As part of the Characterization portion of my high school English Creative Writing units, I often would ask my little writers, “Can you imagine having a ballpoint-pen-sized instrument which, when you secretly positioned it right behind the ear of the kid sitting in front of you, could download and reveal all their thoughts and memories?” My point was this: the interesting and well-written character sketches in literature need to go way beyond the mere standard mugshot-stats of height, weight, color of eyes, and color of hair. The kid sitting in front of you may appear outwardly boring and uninteresting at a glance, but once you peel back their scalp and take a peek inside that brain… SURPRISE! People are usually a lot more interesting that we may be led to believe.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK. I’m going to tell you a little story here, a bed-time story if you will. It’s not a great story or even an important one. Nope, no little Stephen King blockbuster here (although you may find that there is just a whiff of Stephen King-ishness about it). It’s a silly story, actually.  But the thing to remember is… it’s a true one. And it describes one of the little “moments” that has recently just “bubbled up” to the surface of  my  dark and murky subconscious memories… almost as if, say, a brain surgeon had just pressed his electronic probe on just the right spot of my brain…

WEST OF THE WALL

So it’s late June, 1964. A beautiful, blue-sky, sunny morning. I’m at work downtown. Three weeks ago, I graduated from high school and now I’m earning the Big Bucks for college— to the tune of $46 dollars a week take-home pay at Huey Cole’s Esso station. Don’t laugh. $46.00 a week is fair pay for a kid my age.

At this point in my on-the-job training life, I’ve learned almost just enough about grease-monkeying to be seriously dangerous, but fortunately that won’t be an issue today. Because we’ve got the full-time crew on deck tohandle the grease jobs, oil changes, and whatever else. Me? I’m strictly the gas pump jockey. All day long. Easy street.

Well, easy except for the fact that we’re a full-service gas station, meaning that on top of pumping the gas, I also get to wash the windshields, check the customers’ oil, check the air pressure in all four tires, and make sure the distilled water in the batteries is properly topped off. And that’s OK, but… there’s a couple of old ladies (old bags) who roll in here once a week and (if you can believe this) actually make me climb right inside their smelly old car and wash all of their inside windows! On top of all the other stuff! I mean, cripes, have they got a lot of nerve, or what!? It’s crazy, and believe me I’ve complained to the boss about it! But he tells me they’re the customer, and the customer is always right so I’d better do it and do it with a smile! I tell him OK, I’ll do it, but it’d be one hell of a lot easier to smile if that nasty little pug of theirs in the back seat would just stop snarling and nipping at my ankles, for chrissakes! (In case you don’t know this, little pugs were always the standard little old ladies’ dog of choice back then.)

But hey, in the downtime at the station, which there’s usually lots of (our town being a regular Gomer and Goober Pyle Mayberry, R.F.D.), I’ll be lazing much of the day away slouched in the boss’s swivel chair, feet up on the desk, manning the phone, smoking cigarettes, and listening to my favorite station, WGUY Bangor. Listening to the top 40 is just about everything to me, so thank God I’ve got a job where the radio plays all day long. Plus, I like sitting behind a big desk. I tell my buddies, yeah, I got me a desk job this summer.

Around 10:00, just as another new song is beginning to play, a Chevy wagon with a family of five pulls up at the pumps. I mash my filter-tip Kool into the ash tray and head out. It’s a little annoying because I hadn’t caught the name of the new tune. All I’d picked up on is it was something about a wall. Oh well, whatever, I’m sure I’ll be hearing it again sometime. At some point down the road.

By the time I get to step back into the office and ring up the sale, there’s a bunch of commercials going on. But anyway, I slip back into the office chair, put my feet back up, and light up another cancer stick. And as always, keep a sharp eye on the pumps, lest my dad suddenly pulls in and catches me smoking. Sure. I know. I’m seventeen going on eighteen next month. An adult, right? But for some reason I’m just not ready to have that particular fight with the old man.

So, turns out the next song up on the radio is…

 

 

 

Huh! Hey, wait just a minute. That’s the same song as the last one, the one they just played. Which is pretty odd. I mean, they don’t usually play a tune twice in a row, back to back like this. But OK. Cool. I’ll take it. I wanted to hear it again anyway. Now I just don’t hafta wait till tomorrow or the next day. Which is great.

Surprisingly though, good ol’ DJ, Jack Dalton, seems to have forgotten to announce the title of the song. \Which is odd. Didn’t say anything at all, in fact. The song just started playing without even a word from him. But…  so what? Anybody with half a brain can guess the name of the song anyway. I mean, it’s gotta be “West of the Wall,” since that’s the phrase getting repeated over and over in the chorus.

It’s a girl’s voice doing the singing. She sounds cool. I like her voice. She’s probably a real babe, like all of’em. Plus, I like the melody. It’s one of those that gets stuck in your head right away, you know?

Hmmm. It’s this story about the Berlin Wall over in Germany.  About somebody on one side of the wall being separated from somebody else on the other side. Her lover obviously. It’s kinda sad. Like a Romeo and Juliet thing. I like sad songs. But as it draws to the end, I’m focusing right in on it because I really want the title and artist’s name spoken. I still keep my little notebook at home, under my bed next to my radio, where I keep track of new titles and artists and where they’ve currently landed in the top 100. See? But that’s me. Obsessive-compulsive.

OK, now here’s something really odd. The song just came to the end, right? But then, it just simply  started re-playing all over once again. For the third time! And still, not a word from the DJ. Not a word from anybody! So… what gives?

A kind of wild idea pops into my head. Maybe the DJ is the only one at the studio. For some reason, who knows why, he’s gotten stuck working alone today. And… guess what: he’s had himself a little emergency. As in… nature calls. Stuck in the bathroom! Maybe… probably, with a real bad case of the runs, or something. If so, man, wouldn’t I hate to be him! I mean, how awful would that be!? Not to mention embarrassing! You know, you’ve got this job to do. And your boss… not to mention all your listeners out there in radio land… are counting on you to continue their hit parade, but there you are, stuck behind a bathroom door and glued onto the porcelain throne, sweating like a pig, and praying desperately you’ll somehow be able to get back out there to that goddamn microphone. To crawl back if you have to!

Anyway, can’t wait to hear his excuse when he finally does come back on the air. I mean, jeez, what would I say in a situation like that? Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but… see, there was this uhmmm… really insistent payola thug at the door practically threatening to kneecap me if I refused to play his client’s demo? Or… man, I was having this vicious nicotine fit, so I just stepped outside for a couple of drags when… all of a sudden… the wind just slammed the door shutbehind me! And it locked!

Yeah. Poor guy, stuck in the john right now and be going through a dozen possible alibis.

Ah! Here it comes… the song is ending.

Silence.

And then… What? The song just starts right up again! WHAT the…? Something’s going on… but…

Of course a car rolls up to the pumps. Followed by another. Damn it.

Somehow the song is still playing when I return to the cash register. My God, a few more plays and I’ll have all the damn lyrics memorized, right down pat.

But wait a minute! What if this is something a lot more serious?Like, I dunno, did he have a heart attack or something? Yeah, what if he’s just lying there unconscious? Or even DEAD? Holy crap! I dunno how big the guy is or anything but what if, say… his three hundred and fifty pound body is lying there accidentally barricading the door so nobody can get in to help him?

Oh, for cryin’ out loud, would you listen to me. I honestly know how stupid I’m being. I do sometimes enjoy framing all the boredom going onall around me as some tense movie plot. It’s crazy. But I know, I mean I really know the odds are… nothing that exotic, nothing that serious, is gonna turn out being responsible for the never-ending replaying of “West of the Wall,” if that’s what the song actually is called.

Probably the poor soul really is suffering a bathroom emergency.

Still though, the song goes on. And on. For an hour. Through my lunch break. For three hours. Meanwhile, I’ve shared what’s been going on with this phantom broadcast with my co-workers and even some of our customers who’ve stepped into the office. Got’em all scratching their heads for a minute or two. But they’re too busy to care, really. So… I must bear the burden alone.

But for me, whatever it is going on here, it’s created kind of an electric, festive atmosphere. And by now, after all this time, I’m thinking, OK, there really must be at least a… somewhat unusual explanation. For  something as bizarre as this. For me, it’s generated this creepy 1938 War of the World’s broadcast feeling. Or like something right out of The Twilight Zone. I mean, I can’t stop going back to that one Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”

However, all good things must come to an end.

Sometime in the late afternoon, close to the end of my shift, the music… stops!

Stops dead!

Suddenly… nothing but radio silence.

Frozen stock-still, I’m left gawking at the little Zenith radio on the shelf as if it were a TV screen.

Something’s happened! And it’s about time! But OK… what?!

I wait…

And WHOA! Suddenly the radio silence is broken by a crisp announcer’s jarring voice, loudly clearing his throat in a no-nonsense, this-is-serious way. As if whatever it is he’s about to say will be a very grave news bulletin! Oh. My. God. It’s gonna be bad news, I know it. This is big. I’m all like, have the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor again? Have the Russians invaded us? Has another President been shot? Have the monsters blasted Maple Street right off the frickin’ map? WHAT!?

At long last, he launches right into it. And all of us, the vast, entire WGUY radio listening audience everywhere, is finally given the lowdown.

And the lowdown is… kind of incredible.

END OF STORY

Thanks for reading. Please keep a vigilant eye out for the rest of this TRUE STORY, “West of the Wall; The Epilogue,” due to appear on your favorite device’s screen at any moment now…