He was a peculiar little boy, an odd little boy. What made him peculiar... odd... was that he was so ordinary. Perhaps a bit 
taller
than average, perhaps a bit thinner than 'normal'. He did not
intuitively know how to play the piano, he had no linguistic skills and
there was no way he was going to be hitting any balls out of any parks.
In a crowd, he would simply fade into the background.
His friends would prefer to watch paint dry rather than spend a lot of time with him. He was well on his way to downtown Dull. 
But
by happenstance, he noticed one good feature, one limited positive
attribute. He was pretty good at remembering stuff. No, not a
photographic memory (actually it's called eidetic memory) but wouldn't that be cool? Imagine a genealogist with an eidetic memory! Whoooaaaa! The connections would be fast and furious! No,
the boy's memory was only slightly better than average. But since he
had no creativity or raw intelligence, he determined to parlay this tiny
advantage to the best of his 'ability'. So he memorized things in
school and by dumb luck stumbled into the one occupation where he could
really exploit his memory.
He
was too dull (see above) to take up card counting in gambling games so
the only thing left was computer science. His memory and the use of that
memory to recognize patterns made the boy a prime candidate for
geekdom. His accidental entry into this field is probably the only thing
that kept him from the poorhouse (do they still have poorhouses??) and a
steady diet of cat food.
It's possible he couldn't have even
afforded Fancy Feast. It's more likely the generic store versions would
have been on his menu.
So his memory carried the boy into
sort-of-manhood on its shoulders, dragging him part of the way when it
needed to. It saw him through computer programming and analysis and even
a primitive kind of management where he could remember who did what
well and then told them to do that.
But time passes. Arteries harden. Synapses poop out. It's a thing.
His
neurotransmitters began to stay at lunch longer and longer. Sometimes
his post-synaptic density became... how-you-say... a bit too dense.
The boy's memory wasn't what it was. His one positive attribute was going the way of all flesh.
The boy thought, "Crap!"
But then an
event occurred which altered his perception. He was doing some
genealogy work digging into his days as a student at William Jennings
Bryan Elementary School. One of his favorite memories was about his
first grade teacher, Mrs. White. She was his first teacher and it was
such a positive experience that his whole view of school may have been
properly set by this woman. The boy had remembered her through all these
years and years and she had actually come to his mind occasionally and
he would wonder how she was and what she was doing.
But he didn't know who Mrs. White really 
was. What did she look like? He recalls that she was impossibly old, but since he was six years old, what did that mean?
The only thing he recalled for certain was that she had white hair, but that hardly narrowed down the pantheon of possibilities.
So the boy went
back
to do what research he could. Here's his photo from the first grade. He
also found his first grade report card to look for clues. Would you
like to know what he discovered?
The idiot had her name wrong. The smartypants who presumptuously believed that his memory was good and was only now beginning to fail due to physiological issues beyond his control had mis-remembered a crucial fact for decades!
Her name was not Mrs. White, it was Mrs. Marjorie S. Knight. So, the boy realized in a flash of clarity that he had never had a memory worth a damn, it had always been bad. In a bizarre way, this was comforting. He wasn't losing his memory, he never had any!
With
his soul refreshed, the boy turned to his crack genealogy toolkit to
research Mrs. KNIGHT. He discovered she was born August 28, 1910
possibly in Texas where her social security number was issued. She had
married James Weldon Knight in the early forties and had a son Jimmy in
1945. James Weldon was born in 1907 and had lived in Amarillo
solidifying the Texas connection. They divorced in 1954 so it is
possible that she was going through this rough period while the boy was
her student in the 1953-54 school year. He then used all the math skills
at his disposal to cypher that when she was teaching him, Mrs. Knight
was 43 years old. He had been right! She was impossibly old!
During
that period, she had lived only a few blocks from the school. Here's an
aerial photo of North Miami from 1952. If you click on it, you can make
it larger.
In
1984, she moved to Ft. Lauderdale and died there March 20, 1991, twenty
years ago. This was also oddly non-stressful to the boy, since he had
not just missed her by a week which would have been really annoying. 
This
is the apartment where she lived and this is the door she went through
nearly every day of her life in North Miami. The boy still doesn't have a
photo of Mrs. Knight, but that's only a matter of time.
Somewhere
little Jimmy Knight who is now 66 years old carries a part of Mrs.
Knight with him. Let's hope he is carrying on her tradition.
By now, some of the more clever readers out there have divined that this boy we've been discussing is actually ME! How about that! Quite a little twist at the end, huh?
So, what's the parable I referred to at the opening? You can't lose what you never had, so shut up and enjoy yourself. You can take that to the bank.
Update 06/19/2013: I told you the boy would get a photo of Mrs. Knight eventually and so he has.
Thanks to the
collaboration of the wonderful people on the William Jennings Bryan
Facebook page, we now have this image of Mrs. Knight from June 1952.
2 comments:
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Leah Kleylein said...
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you are way too hard on yourself! :-)
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Dave said...
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You make sooooo proud!!
