MY NEW RED BRAIN

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter

My current brain is red. It used to be gray. Helen got me the gray one. I found the red one myself at The Dollar Tree.

Since I am old, I need to have my brain with me at all times. Oh, I know, recently in a CIW I bragged about having a better than average memory. That, however, is about stuff from 50 years ago. I need help with the stuff from two seconds ago. That’s why I carry my red brain with me.

Several of us in our family have a problem with finding the right noun. Technically, that’s dysnomia. [Dysnomia is also the name of the only known moon of the dwarf planet Eris.] So in our family we often refer to an object just by its color, because when we started sentences about it, we couldn’t find the noun, so we would say, “You know, the green,,, the thing in the driveway that you get into for going places.” After a while, the car would simply be “The green.”

This did not work well when our daughters were little and we would say, “Stop hitting your sister with the blue hammer” and she would reply, “It’s not blue; it’s azure,” and keep on pounding her sister’s blond.

My red brain is plastic and has a sturdy handle and three compartments. My old gray was nice, and the same size as my red, but it had thin plastic handles that broke and only one compartment. If you need to carry your brain with you, it’s good for it to have a handle. If you have a lot on your mind, it’s good for your brain to have compartments.

I’m learning to use my new red compartmentalized brain. It’s quite exciting. Just today I found a special place to keep my extra hankie, good for wiping glasses lenses and for a quick mop-up of spilled coffee, that makes the hankie more accessible but still not in the way of the poetry part [a 5x7 tablet] of my brain. There are places for a magnifying glass, and tall skinny folder with to-do lists, and a cup for pens and pencils and scissors and a little flashlight and a Swiss army knife and a chapstick, and an address book, and various pairs of glasses, and a Greek New Testament, and two telephones. My red brain is complete.

Now if I could just remember where I left my red brain…

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com