The Trouble With Memory

For reasons I won't go into, the phrase "fatty tissue" kept nagging at the corner of my memory all week. Finally remembered a tape of a PBS kid show about using arithmetic to solve mysteries. The boys probably watched the tape in the early Nineties. I think Fatty Tissue was the name of a character on the show--sort of a hapless former baseball player with a heart of gold...

Fatty Tissue was not the name of the poolshark in that Jackie Gleason movie. About that time I realized that I had confused Fatty Arbuckle with Chubby Checkers again.

The trouble with history is that it won't stay pinned down and neatly labeled in my memory like the entomology specimens in the cases at the Field Museum in Chicago. Whatever I once knew has scuttled under the refrigerator during the night. It may have been a shiny scarab, or a hideous roach, but it'll be mighty tricky to find it now.

"Whittaker Chambers" flashed in my stream-of-conscious this week, too, in a very small font size. So who was Whittaker Chambers? Someone in history....someone with a pumpkin....someone with McCarthyism...I had to look it up, of course. It's a sickness. If you already remembered Alger Hiss, you win our grand prize. Don't get mixed up with Horatio Alger or Wilt "The Stilt" Chamberlin. Obviously, the memory roaches are breeding further confusion down there under the refrigerator.

Last week when I was looking for padlocks that still had their keys, I came across the Ento-Pins from the ninth grade biology class insect project. I still need the display board and the labels, and a long-handled net...