Best of the Welcome Columns


Best of the Welcome Columns

Author: Martin, George
Some things you just can’t forget

Five days a week I begin my morning with breakfast and Jon Carroll’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Carroll always has something interesting to say; sometimes he’s really funny, sometimes political, sometimes touching and profound. This past Tuesday he wrote a column about “sticky” and more particularly, “non-sticky” facts. He wrote about his fondness for reading books and articles about arcane subjects, and how the material in said books frequently doesn’t stay available in his mind for long. “The book,” he wrote, recalling a particular popular volume on meteors and meteorites, “included lessons in geography, geology, metallurgy, astronomy and much more. I really liked it, and for a few days I recommended the book to friends. Now I can’t remember the name of the book. I can’t remember the name of the author. Worse yet, I can remember hardly any of the fascinating facts the book revealed. “The knowledge was not sticky. It was there long enough for me to talk about, which is supposed to reinforce memory, but it was not there much longer than that. Today if there is a meteor in the sky I will say, ‘There’s a meteor in the sky. I read a book about that once.’” That happens to me all the time. I recently read a book by Bill Bryson (not the bass player; the travel writer) called At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Bryson used the example of his own house, a former parsonage built in 1851 as a lens to view the history of all sorts of inventions (toilets, electricity) and ways various rooms were used and how their uses evolved. It was an utterly fascinating book; I could hardly put it down. But a few months later one of the few actual facts I recall from it was that when one pays for “room and board” the word “board” comes from a wooden plank that they used to lay across the laps of people seated on benches as a platform for food, before actual tables were in common use. You can read the entire column here: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/ Look for the one about Unsticky Knowledge: meteors and qubits. Note the very last paragraph (which in the actual Chronicle was a mini-headline submerged in the column: “Song lyrics, probably because they are reinforced by music, are incredibly sticky.” Now there is A True Statement. Readers of a certain age, when I write: “You’ll wonder where the yellow went...” will immediately think, “when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.” That jingle was on radio and TV at least 40 years ago and yet my (and your?) brain remembers it perfectly. A few weeks ago a truncated version of the Prairie Rose Band was playing the new Frog & Fiddle in Alameda, successor to McGrath’s. Two of our members weren’t able to be there and we were thankful to have Bruno Brandli helping out with his mandolin and Tom Cline on Dobro. A patron came up and dropped some folded bills into our tip bucket (always a good way to get our attention) and asked, “Could you do ‘North to Alaska?’” To put it mildly, this song is not in our repertoire. Pauline Scholten, my longtime singing partner, looked at me, and I looked at her. “Damn, what’s that first line?” I said. “Big Sam left Seattle...” she replied, and with that the sound of Johnny Horton came bubbling out of some very deeply buried neurons in my brain. I plunked a few chords on my banjo to find a key I could sing it in (actually it turned out to be about two notes too high, but that’s another problem) and off we went. I haven’t heard that song in many years but we got through it and the customer was happy. I just googled the lyrics and noticed that I got the name of one of the miners wrong (it’s George Pratt, not George Craft) and one line that the Web site says is “going north, the rush is on” I remembered as “going north to Russia’s gold.” But that’s just a mondegreen (another Jon Carroll invention) a commonly misunderstood song lyric like “Round John Virgin,” the fat guy in the Christmas carol “Silent Night.” Sticky lyrics. A great concept. Maybe when my dementia kicks in and I can no longer remember what I had for breakfast this morning, I’ll still be able to sing.

Posted: 5/12/2011