We all carry a lot of baggage with us on our journey through this life. It’s a rare moment when we find ourselves free from all the traces from the past that we lug along– all the snippets of conversations, faces, song melodies and lyrics, pictures, smells, film clips and everything else we have input into the hard drive of our mind is always whirring around. I know that I will sometimes pull up some fragment from the past and wonder how I was still holding on to this piece of information. It might be the name of someone that I barely knew forty or fifty years before. Somehow it hangs on and occasionally pops out, confounding me with the idea that this seemingly useless bit of data is taking up space that could be occupied by truly meaningful information.
Like old Popeye cartoons. ( The one with Olive Oyl singing What We All Need is Brotherly Love runs on a loop in my head)
Or the year that Humphrey Bogart died.(1957)
Or the name of the book that influenced the original Superman comic. ( It was Philip Wylie‘s Gladiator— an interesting read, by the way.)
But somehow, despite and because of all this detritus, we emerge in some individual form.
A single distilled version of everything that we take in.
A single voice. One song.
I guess that is how I would characterize the thought behind the painting at the top, The Song We Carry. It’s 7″ by 11″ on paper and is going to the West End Gallery for my upcoming show.
Now here’s a little Popeye along with Wilco. It’s a video for Wilco’s Dawned on Me from last year and it features the first hand-drawn Popeye cartoon in over 30 years. I can’t remember if Olive Oyl danced like this in my memory but now I will. The data has been entered.
Redtree Times 
Ricky Nelson wore size ten shoes and his favorite color was red.
How do I remember that seemingly irrelevant information? I’m not entirely clear on the “how”, but I suspect I know part of the “why” – it’s emotion. I had the biggest crush ever on Ricky Nelson all those years ago, and information that’s grounded in emotion is more memorable.
I don’t think it has to be grand, sweeping emotion – just something that has an emotional component. The most recent example I can think of came a few days ago when I read a post about swinging, and I suddenly was right back in the basement of my childhood home, where dad put up a rope and board swing for me to use during the winters. I remembered swinging and singing “Lady of Spain”.
I know, I know. That’s not just memorable, it’s a little weird. But still – I remember not only the words to that darned song, but the simple pleasure of being warm and cozy, swinging and singing.
It’s funny how the mind operates. Now I will probably know forever that Ricky Nelson’s favorite color was red. I doubt that “lady of Spain” will ever occupy that same sort of space that it does for you although I did like the video from what must have been “Your Hit Parade” or some show of that type.
On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Redtree Times
Olive oyl totally danced like that…
That’s right, you dated her for a while, didn’t you? Wasn’t that on Nantucket?
On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Redtree Times