UGLY SISTERS [Sun, 10-29-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—UGLY SISTERS [Sun, 10-29-23]

 

I have a pinball brain, and it’s the fault of the ugly sisters…

I had two sisters. Both quite pretty. So I don’t like the term “ugly sisters” very much, but brain scientists tell us that it’s the “ugly sisters” who create so many of our old age memory problems.

Ugly sisters are memories that are sort of like the memory we are trying to construct.

That’s a key—construct. Because we don’t remember a memory, we re-construct it.

Here is a very crude synopsis of how memory works: An event happens. It comes to us in sight and sound and smell and emotion, to the hippocampus part of the brain. The hippocampus takes all those different elements and combines them into a whole. But, unlike you’d think of something named for hippos, the hippocampus is relatively small. It does not have room for all the different memories it is creating. So it farms them out to other parts of the brain… but not all in one place. There are different places for smells and sounds and sights and emotions. When you want that “memory,” your hippocampus has to re-call them and recombine all those elements from all those places. That’s when the ugly sisters appear…

…because you have lots of smell and sound and sight and emotion stuff from the past in your brain. The older you are, the more of it you have. And the hippocampus has to look all through your brain to get the right elements together to recreate that former event, what we call a memory. When people say their memory is slow because they have so many memories, they are right!

Say you’re trying to remember the name of the car dealer who sold you that Ford Fiesta. The Ford car is stored in the same place in your brain as Gerald Ford. You ask yourself: Isn’t he the one that Lyndon Johnson said he played too much football before they invented the helmet? And fiesta is Mexican, isn’t it? Was the Ford Fiesta manufactured in Mexico? Don’t they have tacos at fiestas? Oh, oh… ugly sisters. All understandable, but your brain pinballs from to Gerald Ford, to football and why IU can’t win, to tacos, to Taco Bell, to a guy you knew called Taco, but he was Japanese, to nuclear bombs… Those are the ugly sisters. And you never did get to the name of that Ford dealer.

It's like the way Seymour met Beverly. She was a nurse in an old people’s care place. Seymour was the new preacher who came to do a Sunday afternoon worship. The service was carried on the public address system, so that even the room-bound could “attend.” Beverly said, “They were singing, and there was the most God-awful voice I’d ever heard coming out of the speaker in the ceiling. I just had to go see who it was. It was Seymour.” That’s how they met. They were married a long time, and Seymour always said, “The best thing about being married to a geriatric nurse, the older I get, the more interested she is in me.” Beverly always said the best thing was when he didn’t sing.

It’s true that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” It’s good to accept the ugly sisters, just as Beverly accepted Seymour. She just wanted to find out who had that ugly voice, and she got a handsome husband.

Ugly sisters are part of the family, too. Embrace them when they come, because maybe they’ll end up being better memories even that the ones you were trying to construct.

John Robert McFarland