Hunker Down With Kes: Our Minds Need Bigger Yoga Pants

I had to write a report in Miss Belle Alexander’s history class in the third grade. I asked Dad for some direction. He deadpanned, “Son, don’t tell them everything you know in the first paragraph.”

I completely missed the humor, sarcasm, joke, or whatever he was conveying. All I could think of was I didn’t know enough to fill up one paragraph, much less an entire page like she expected. I didn’t have enough words. Or thoughts in my head. Or experiences to pull from.

Some days I wish I could go back to those simple times when my brain didn’t have enough “stuff” in it to fill up one page. Knowledge is wonderful, but how much of it can we “take in” before we overload the circuits….

The mind is an amazing machine. It is as expandable as some of those yoga pants I see people wearing when they ought not to. Miss Belle put a fair share of “things” in my almost wide-open mind. When you add that to what the rest of the elementary teachers poured in over the years, you can see where I’m going here.

And then you’ve got to throw Leon in. Good gracious alive, my older brother started talking to me while I was still in the crib. And it wasn’t nothing about two plus two, moon phases, or George Washington cutting down cherry trees. It was about us memorizing all the acts that ever appeared in Texas Jack’s Wild West Circus.

Later, he was so proud of being caught up in that alien space ship, he told me everything they taught him. He said I could not be a true St. Louis baseball fan unless I could name everyone who ever played for them. Leon had a list of girls that he made me memorize certain things to say to each one of them…about him.

He never quit. His stories had stories. I could never differentiate fact from fiction. So, I had to learn it all. He would wake me up to tell me some trivia that would do nothing but take up more space in my ever-expanding gray matter.

And there was Mom’s family. I’m telling you, they just kept-a-coming! Aunts, uncles, in-laws, outlaws, cousins by the dozens. It was Coxey’s army on steroids. I couldn’t just call them Earl and Billy Bob. I had to put a name with every face!

By the time I got to junior high, classmates were calling me balloon head behind my back.

And to my dismay, the learning really began to pile up in earnest. Mrs. Velna Gray Paschall was a history teacher extraordinaire. She didn’t spoon knowledge in one small gulp at a time. She poured it in by the shovelful!

I learned to conjugate verbs in Latin when I was a sophomore. Guess how many people in life have rushed up asking me to give them a little amo, amas, amat lesson? Talk about taking up space. For no useful purpose! And somehow, you can’t get rid of stuff like that. It just hangs around, like a stray cat, or an ex-girlfriend who really likes your mother.

College was a whole new ball of wax. Dates, battles, formulas, political theories, fiction as reality, Shakespeare unmasked, John Milton’s funny side, and the life and times of Mahatma Gandhi were thrust upon us. I learned, in order, the names of five centuries’ worth of rulers from countries I had never heard of.

By the middle of the last semester of my junior year, I thought my “overcrowded mind” was going to explode….

I worked one summer at the Grand Ole Opry. You’d better believe I “collected” every word Loretta Lynn said to me. I took to memorizing most every song any of the Opry stars were singing, including Roger Miller’s “My Uncle Used to Love Me but She Died.”

Sadly, the mind does not work like an Etch A Sketch. You can’t just turn it upside down and all the clutter and Roger Miller songs are erased.

And understand I’m not just talking about my brain here. You’ve got one too! You have your own Mahatma Gandhi collection. You might have even had a sibling like Leon. Although that is hard to fathom.

And then we reach the age where we walk into a room and can’t remember why. We set the milk on the counter and never put it back. We greet an old friend on the street, and we can remember where he lives, how long we have known him, how many kids he has…we just can’t remember his name.

I used to worry about losing my mind.

But my grandson, when he was about six, put me at ease on that score. I couldn’t remember the exact date for the fall of the Alamo. I was really straining…Luke interrupted, “KK, don’t worry about it. You are so old and know so much and have so many facts running around in your brain, it’s no wonder they get jumbled up sometimes.”

Out of the mouths of babes….

Respectfully,

Kes

kesley45@aol.com