Goines On: Forgetting remembered

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Goines found disquieting the growing number of signs that Mrs. Goines was forgetting to attend to the same things over and over again – like where she had left her glasses or her iPhone.
    But then he remembered he kept forgetting to attend to things like that too.
    It was reassuring that he wasn’t alone in it.

Copyright © 2023 by Moristotle

Goines On: Memorial Day

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Goines’ eyes blinked in consternation – he thought he might have emailed a friend that, no, he had not “celebrated” Memorial Day. (His friend had inquired whether he was having beer and burgers that day.)
    Not “celebrated” Memorial Day? Had he really said that? People didn’t celebrate Memorial Day, did they? Didn’t they rather sadly remember military veterans and other lost people, places, and things? 
    Goines hadn’t even been aware that Monday was Memorial Day until he tried to call the library and was told they were closed for the holiday.

Goines On: Shaving thoughts

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For the several-hundredth time, while Goines was shaving, he thought of one of the three white ladies to whom he had been a colored maid, à la the 2011 film The Help. 2011 was the year two of the white ladies entered his life, after UNC’s Office of the President was shaken up by the retirement of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and his replacement took his place, bringing along from her previous gig the assistant who had done her bidding there and would continue to do it at UNC, while supervising Goines.

Goines On: Raging

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Goines’ bedtime thoughts for two nights were topsy-turvy and frustrating, owing mainly to his inability to hold intermediary thoughts in short-term memory.

    “Frustrating” hardly captured it. During the second night (after the incident of the empty sheriff’s car with its engine running) he groggily thought he had pieced together the characteristics of the 2200 bumped cycle, but he wasn’t sure, because it apparently wasn’t 40 years long (like the 2100 bump). 

    The morning after that second night, now awake and able to jot done stuff, he went over (and over) his nighttime finding for the 2200 bumped cycle and found that it was 28 years long, which seemed odd, because that was the same number of years as the standard 28-year cycle. Goines slogged on to the end of the 2001–2400 calendar period, taking notes as he went.

Goines On: 2021 or 2001?

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Goines thought he should first explain to the prospective 12-year-old programming whiz that his personal mnemonic

        “Mi Ki Ko Ranch” rattles Miquel

had been chosen for practical reasons, because it represented Goines’ present year, 2021. The kid might think it made more sense for a program to use the year 2001 – it seemed cleaner somehow... unless he or she chose to use 2021 as a way of attributing Goines – which Goines would have to agree would be nice.

Goines On: The bumps

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Over several days, Goines further cogitated the “bump problem” that arose when a 00 non-leap year came along and interrupted the standard 28-year cycle, with its pattern of 6₁-11-6₂-5 sub-cycles. He believed he could specify a pattern for the 400-year stretches as well, each one comprising three 00-years that aren’t leap years.
    He had already traced the 6₁-11-6₂-5 sub-cycles back to 1909, within 8 years of the 1900 non-leap year, and up to 2099, where the 6₁-11-6₂ portion of 28-year cycle butted up against the 2100 non-leap year. He now needed to examine that bump at 2100, and the bumps at 2200 & 2300 as well.

Goines On: Before 1901, after 2099?

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Goines looked at his archives and discovered that he had years ago pieced together more about calendar recycling than he was currently re-piecing together. He had tackled the subject in some depth eight years earlier, even written a sestina about it for the Goineses’ 47^th wedding anniversary.
    While he didn’t think he still had the brain power those earlier investigations required, he was pleased that he was managing to re-tool a thing or two for his “parlor trick.”

Goines On: Shortcut to 1976

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The night following Goines’ successful experiments with shifting to past years from the 2021 calendar, his thoughts were troubled. Why was he even thinking about this? What did it gain him – or anyone else? As a painter had said to him when he touted his calendar mnemonic to her, “Just consult a calendar for the year in question!”
    And anyway, when did anyone even need to know what day of the week a date in some other year fell on? Wasn’t this mnemonic thing just a parlor trick? Poets – like that painter who hadn’t been impressed – concerned themselves with trees and flowers, light and shade, human and geological history, man’s failings and successes, life and death. 

Goines On: Those elusive leap years

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In the few days remaining before their flight to California, Goines wondered whether the solution to the problem of calculating the day of the week for dates in past or future years might be a lot simpler than he had been imagining. What if he just used his mnemonic for the current year (“Mi Ki Ko Ranch” rattles Miquel) and then “shifted” to the year of the date in question?
    The calendar for next year varies from this year’s calendar by starting either 1 day or 2 days later in January, depending on whether this year is, or is not, a leap year (2021 is not). Leap years have 366 days, or 35 weeks plus 2 days. Last year’s calendar starts a day or two earlier in the week for the same reasons. Goines wasn’t going to solve this before they left, so he tried to stop thinking about it and finish packing.

Goines On: Stress junkie

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Goines told Bic he needed to finish the flyer that he was helping Bic with because the Goineses were going out of town for a week. Bic told him not to “stress himself” – if he didn’t finish before they left, it was okay. But the phrase brought Goines the realization that he wanted to get the job done before they left. Bic had just triggered the insight that when it comes to positive, creative stress, Goines was a junkie. He loved creative stress, he needed it!

Lights, Camera, Action!

Two Poems of Old Age

By Moristotle

The first poem below more or less wrote itself one morning, in the moments after I experienced the internal argument whether or not to flip that light switch. In the days that followed, my ruminations grew to include the ideas of the second poem, and I thought at first that I could work those ideas into the first poem. But I soon learned that I couldn’t – or it would be better not to. For better or worse: “Practicing to Die” and “Rehearsing to Live.”


Practicing to Die

Don’t do it! 

Do it! 

No, don’t do it!
I yell at myself in the silence of my mind.
I remind myself I’m carrying a tray,
better safe than sorry.
I used to lift a finger to flip off the kitchen light
as I passed toward the dining table.
I have done it many times.

Remembering April 4, 2014

It started with “More about creativity”

By Moristotle

Thanks to Sharon Stoner for reminding us today, by commenting, of a “Fish for Friday” column published exactly three years ago today (when April 4 was a Friday). She made this comment:

I’ve often wondered if when I die will there be anyone left who knew me. Without friends all that is left is, alone!

Ask Wednesday: How can I know what day it is?

Use a memory device

By Morris Dean

Today's Q & A follows up on previous columns about calendar patterns. On May 15, for example, we explained in verse why we need only fourteen calendars.
    Thanks to the anonymous person who provided today's questions. [His or her questions are set in italics.]

Fish for Friday

Limerick of the Week:

We've met before and I really wish I
Were able to think of your name. Pish, I
    Cannot, I'm coming up blank,
    But forgetting has to rank
A catchy topic for today's Fish Fri.!

I racked and racked my brain, but couldn't remember any episodes of forgetfulness.

Is today Saturday?

Today's the sixth day of retirement, and every one of them has seemed like Saturday. It's a good thing, except I'm never sure which column to take my pills from.
    Today is Saturday, isn't it?

Speaking of memory, I spent about an hour this morning going through most of the rest of the boxes I brought home from the office. One of the items I found was my leather-binder collection of congratulatory letters written to me and presented on the occasion of my 25th anniversary at IBM (January 16, 1992), where I remained another five years.
    I hadn't looked at them for twenty years. The comments that struck me the most were thanks for my cheerfulness, helping people, sharing everything, professionalism. They were, by and large, of the same sort I have received lately from my colleagues at the University. Very touching. But sad, too—not because I'm retired now and can't be cheerful or helpful or sharing or professional any more. I can still be all that, and I'm sure I will be, for though I may have become a bit cynical over the past few years (I think it's true), I'm basically who I am and can't change the fact that I'm cheerful, optimistic, helpful, etc.
    But being reminded how much other people appreciate these things has made me more thoughtful, more aware of an excellent reason to be cheerful and so on. That is, aside from the immediate personal satisfaction I derive from it all.

Now, after my second retirement, I'm more aware than ever that what matters most is our present moments and what we do and who we are in each of them, one by one. I hugged my wife when I came in from the garage and told her so. I almost wept.
    I've consigned all those letters of twenty years ago to the recycling bin (along with scores and scores of letters and postcards from a number of people—including school friends Jon Price, Chuck Smythe, Jim Carney, Bill Silveira, high school teachers Morris Knudsen, Lois Thompson, Al King, sisters Patsy, Flo, Anna, Mary, Mama, cousins Billy Charles Duvall, Lisa Duvall Carter, friends Thom Green, Lucia McKay, Harriet Mabbutt, Sverre Vik, Barry Wright, new Bulgarian relatives Veska & Jordan Ravnopolski, Milka K...as well as several other letter writers whose names didn't even dredge up a face at this point. It was such a walk down memory lane, it hurt after a while.
    Two things are interesting to me about the cache of letters.
    First, what were they doing in my office? I'm still thinking about that one. But I imagine that the answer will provide justification enough for letting go of them now.
     Second, the letters were from roughly the same period, with its 25th Yale Class Reunion in June 1989, Youie Summer, its aftermath of Chronic Fatique Syndrome the following year, our son's marriage and departure for Bulgaria. At times, life has taken its toll of me, and it may be taking a toll now.
    I reckon I'll find out.

The days are getting [something comparative]

It was still dark at seven this morning. I had just pressed our coffee.
    "The days are sure getting longer," I called to my wife in the dining room.
    "You mean shorter," she said. "The nights are getting longer."
    "Right," I said, "whatever. One of those comparative words."
    My wife harumphed.
    "I knew it was a comparative word," I said. "I can still remember word classifications."
    My brain wheels whirred some more. "As long as I can remember word classifications, I'll be all right."
    Whir.
    "When I can't remember word classifications, then I'll be in trouble."
    "Really in trouble," my wife adjusted.

25 years later: ready to let go

We'll be downsizing soon (moving to a smaller house on a smaller lot), and I've spent much of this weekend removing from our attic the rest of the boxes (mostly) that I didn't bring down last weekend. Much of the stuff I found up there had been...well, "stuffed" is the appropriate term...stuffed up there soon after we moved in in 1983. And not thought of since. Until today. And today we're mostly doing what we might have done twenty-five years ago: throwing it away.

I'm naturally wondering what we thought we were keeping it for. Probably not for any practical reasons, but just in order to buy some time to distance ourselves from the past it represented so that we'd become ready, someday, to let it go. And today, indeed, we're not feeling much attachment to any of the stuff at all. We're long since ready to let it go and be done with it. Dusty boxes, moldy paper...faded or forgotten memories.

My wife did set aside her tassel from the mortarboard she wore for high school graduation (45 years ago), however. And I set aside my "Youie Journal" from 1989, intending before I recycle the paper to try to read and understand what I was experiencing that manic summer when I imagined that The She-God fancied me.

Exception to the commutative law for addition!

I've been looking for years for an exception to the commutative law for addition [and subtraction], and at last I've found it! One way to state the commutative law is that

a + (b + c) = (a + b) + c

and I was always amazed to find that it held, time after time after time.

So you can imagine how excited I am to have discovered an exception:

Yesterday at midnight, Blogger bumped up my age from 63 to 64. That is,

[current year] - 1943 = 64.

But check this! I graduated from college in 1964. I was 21 years old. That is:

1964 - 1943 = 21.

But it is now 42 years later

[current year] - 1964 = 42

and

21 + 42 = 63, not 64.

That is, as an explicit exception to the commutative law:

[current year¹] - 1943 ≠ [current year²] - 1964 - 21.

...Oh, sh_t...(1) Blogger (obviously!) changed the calender. (2) And I didn't.

If we've forgotten a book...

In a New York Times Magazine piece by Daphne Merkin about the playwright Tom Stoppard:

...Stoppard posed the quandary: "One of the questions that haunts me—it's a question for philosophers and brain science—is, if you've forgotten a book, is that the same as never having read it?" With a slight twist, you could put the question another way and it would contain all the intrigue and wily psychic machinations that have accompanied Stoppard throughout his blazing achievements and rich personal life: if you forget the unpleasant experiences you've once lived through—if you choose to begin the tape at 1946 instead of 1937—does that mean they never happened? ["Playing with Ideas," November 26, 2006]

The question, of course, is whether we've really forgotten that book. And whether experience of which we can't recall a memory is really gone and can have no effect on us. I don't think so.

Not only does Stoppard's question seem to ignore a hundred years of thinking about the unconscious, I think I have a recent counterexample from my own experience. In October, I wrote a post (footnote 2) in which I referred to revelation made to someone else and recommended to us as authoritative (because "it's in the Bible") as being merely "hearsay" as far as we're concerned. Then, a few weeks later, I discovered that that is how Thomas Paine also referred to it in a book that I had read 50 years ago...and "forgotten"—not forgotten that I'd read it, but forgotten precisely what Paine had said.

Q.E.D.?