What Clings To The Marrow

We seem to have no control over what sticks or what sloughs off the flypaper of our memory. Why can I name almost everyone in FDR’s cabinet of eighty-three years ago but hardly anyone in Obama’s or even Biden’s, not to mention a telephone book full of athletes?

Were Mutt and Jeff the inspiration for pairing Sydney Greenstreet with Peter Lorre?  Each of these names comes with a face as do Walter Winchell, Wendell Wilkie and Whirlaway.  

What may seem endlessly fascinating to me is sure to elicit a yawn to anyone else. Yet as an aggregate they reveal my propensities, passions and follies and, by omission, my vacancies.

Perhaps there is nothing trivial about trivia. We are archeologists sifting through the rubble of our own journey. One man’s artifact is another’s trash. Shard by shard we can reconstruct our illustrious junk sculpture of a life. If nothing else this private gallery can be the stuff to get us through an MRI.

Credit radio for evoking so many visual images. We stared into speakers and conjured everything from a barroom brawl to a courtroom drama. When Edward R. Morrow reported of bombs dropping on London I took cover under the blanket. I could smell the green grass and hot dogs when the ball game was announced and even took it for granted that Edgar Bergen’s mouth never moved when he ventriloquized Charlie McCarthy. It was our own imagining that got engraved in our bones. As the ratio of our senses is altered, we generate our own compensation. The visuals of audio. 

We live in a chaos of factoids where celebrities come and go faster than breaking news breaks yet why do the old irrelevancies still cling to the marrow? If I once knew the answer to this question I have long since forgotten it.

And so we beat on, (like Fitzgerald's Gatsby) boat against the current with a cargo of etched moments, ceaselessly into the past.