Corners of the Mind

A mind is a terrible thing to waste so they say. But that’s exactly what happens – the thing just wastes away, bit by bit. Just as you are born, you just as readily begin your inevitable, imperceptible decline. Apparently, the mind isn’t the steel fortress of filing cabinets and reel-to-reel movies that we’ve made it out to be. If you listened to WYNC’s Radio Lab you would know this.

Instead, it’s a rather delicate membrane. It is permeable in some spots, though not in others. As soon as you witness something and lock it away forever as the happiest day of your life, the mugging on 65th street, a college graduation, or summers by the sea, your memory has already gone and fractured the whole thing into an impossible kaleidoscope of nuances. Sight, sound, color, faces, places, and words are continually rearranged every time a memory is recalled. This is why trial witnesses often make or break a case – condemning or setting free individuals based on the possibility of having seen or heard something somewhere some place in time.

Memories are little more than reimagined vignettes that we replay for ourselves behind closed eyes. My own are like little films that are silent in some parts where the dialogue has faded to all but vigorously moving mouths because I’m not sure who said what several years down the road. I never remember the superlatives – the most embarrassing thing, the funniest thing, the scariest thing, the best thing. How does one choose when with a mere flick of the wrist the kaleidoscope shifts the pieces into a completely new pattern? Memory is a razor’s edge of truth with vast emptiness on either side. Overtime, the mental picture degrades and the details become vague generalizations.

My sense of smell or hearing is what brings most of my most favorite memories to the surface. Late summer nights when the cicadas are humming loudly in the dark remind me of the blackness of the South African night, lying awake in the heavy, humid heat. The smell of honeysuckle reminds me of hidden Manhattan gardens, Central Park in the spring, and Savannah, Georgia.

Memories of people are the hardest to hold on to. There are many things about humans that are ephemeral: the sound of their laugh, the smell of their skin, their handwriting…We go to great lengths to preserve moments with photographs and recordings and home movies, but nothing is as sweet as the vision you hold for yourself, even if it’s flawed by the workings of millions of tiny neurons.

Biology 241

I miss my father at the strangest and, frankly, inopportune moments. For instance, when I am trying to innoculate trypticase soy agar plates with bacterial specimens for Microbiology lab. I’m diligently swabbing my plate when my memory hits ‘rewind’ all the way to the 6th grade.

It was at the tender age of 12 when my father decided that it was high-time I became well trained in the scientific process. Shouldn’t all 12 year olds be familiar with staph. aureus, aseptic technique, and the nuances of managing millions of microbes? Other kids were growing tomato plants under various light sources or turning potatoes into transistor radios – things the average parent could easily handle. My dad, though, was nothing if not a scientist. Dad thought it would be brilliant for me to investigate the actual efficacy of the anti-bacterial sponges that had come into vogue among anxious, germ-phobic housewives.

One summer evening, he came through the front door bearing a heavy cardboard box loaded up with agar plates, mechanical pipettes, sterile swabs, sterile saline, bacteria/fungal/yeast colonies, and other tools of the trade. Free bacterial specimens are no doubt just one of the perks of being well-liked at a major academic institution. Needless to say, it was a long summer of science. My experiment was housed in a small, vacant room in our basement whose floor tiles emanated the sickly-sweet smell of microbes for months after the school year had started. This less than thrilled my mother who didn’t register the same joy I felt over successfully nurturing a colony of staph. aureus or discovering a perfectly round clear zone around a chunk of sponge.

Dad and I were bosom-buddies in our love for discovery, for that eureka! moment. To my 12 year old self, that summer was filled with annoyingly tedious moments – Dad demonstrating the proper innoculation of an agar plate, Dad helping me create my very first lab notebook, Dad pulling me from other activities to ask “Have you checked your plates today?” Yet, no one was prouder when I found a blue first-prize ribbon dangling from my presentation board in the school gymnasium.

My grief isn’t palpable in many of the everyday moments where most would expect sadness to rear it’s ugly head. My memories of him are tightly woven together with certain life events. I don’t merely miss his presences in the house. I miss all of the things we’re not going to discover or being able to call him after one of my labs to report on our latest experiment or recounting how I got to see a new procedure at the hospital. When I’m driving my car, I remember him frustratedly teaching me to parallel park between trash cans he had set too close together, which leads me to memories of learning to drive a stick shift in South Africa that remind me of the phone calls when he would ask “When you coming home, girl?” even though he knew my departure was still 6 or 5 or 4 months away.

It’s only natural that Dad would pop up in Biology 241 and whisk my mind away from my droning professor to that little room in our basement in the summer of 1996 that held not just the smell of microbes, but also the possibility of discovery.

An Essay for UPenn Nursing

I am not a fan of March. It is my least favorite month of the year. The air continues to have a noticeable chill to it, the streets are often lined with the blackened remnants of a February snowfall, and people are still feeling sluggish from the winter holidays. 

This particular year in March, however, was partly the same, but mostly different from the 21 instances of March that I had previously experienced. As usual, I was on a spring holiday from school and the weather was just beginning to show hints of change from one season to the next. Instead of wandering through the wind-whipped, gritty streets of Manhattan, though, I was midway through a trip along the Eastern coast of South Africa. Instead of being at the center of everything, I found myself on the outskirts of nowhere in a town called Storms River that is known only for two things: having the world’s oldest tree in one of the world’s oldest forests and having the world’s highest commercial bungee jump site.

On this particular day in March I learned a very important lesson about myself: fear is least often the hindrance in life that I assumed it to be. Rather, fear is most often a catalyst for change and growth. Let me preface anything further by saying that, since childhood, I had been a feet-firmly-planted-on-the-ground, levelheaded, ridiculously cautious kind of girl. I cross the street with the light and I color inside the lines. Most importantly, I don’t throw myself off of bridges in foreign countries. Except until now…

On the outskirts of nowhere, in a small town called Storms River that is known only for two things, I decided that the world’s oldest tree in one of the world’s oldest forests wasn’t going anywhere. I opted, instead, to wait atop the arch of the Bloukrans Bridge, between the shallow river below and the N2 highway above, until it was my turn.

I like to imagine that this decision was the result of a moment of temporary insanity or the Scottish tourists who plied me with the hackneyed “you only live once”. Most likely though, this particular March day was a breaking point; a day for breaking the rules, breaking out of the mold, breaking out of my shell. Always making the “safe” choice just wasn’t cutting it for me anymore. I felt that I wasn’t carving my own path in life by continuing to follow the proverbial road most traveled.

The view from the Bloukrans Bridge when 708 feet in the air is spectacular and every other compelling adjective one can think of. On one side the India Ocean spreads itself out; a watery blue blanket that both hugs the rocky shoreline and stretches far beyond the horizon. On the other side, Nature’s Valley is a lush spread of peaked mountains, verdant trees and grasses, and the steady babbling of the Bloukrans River. The image is so postcard-perfect that I almost don’t realize that I am hurtling downwards at 50 mph with nothing but elastic attached to my ankles. When I come to rest after the bouncing and jostling and sway whichever way the wind dictates, I convince myself that I am still alive and open my eyes. Everything, even the fear I feel, is upside down and it rushes towards my head from the pit of my stomach as I wait for a tiny Zulu man – my rescue – to lower himself towards me on what looks like a window washing seat?! The ascent is actually worse than the throwing-yourself-off-a-bridge part – it is painfully slow and there is plenty of time for me to take in every inch of those 708 feet. Nothing, not even the feel of solid ground beneath my feet, is sweeter than the thrill of knowing I survived my first-ever daredevil stunt.

I have since come to look at a lot of things through the lens of my bungee jump experience. When I face something particularly challenging or frightening, I remember falling 708 feet off of a bridge in South Africa. I remember that I survived. I remember the rush of adrenaline and exhilaration afterwards. These thoughts push me through tunnels, up hills, around obstacles and inspire me to attempt feats in my life that I may not have tried before: learning a new skill, taking a class, meeting new people, traveling to new places, or deciding on a career path. I can’t say that I’ve bungee jumped since that day in March, but I can say that I have learned to take careful, calculated risks, to hurdle the hard parts in life. I am much less fearful and much more resilient than I ever gave myself credit for, and taking that oft quoted “road less traveled” really has made all the difference.

 

Something From Spring

Last night, I happened upon a garden that smelled so delightful that I wanted to pull it up to my face like a blanket fresh out of the dryer.  The earth was crowded with Daffodils, their flowers like little trumpets, and tulips with petals still shyly closed against the darkening sky. I was teased by the light notes of honeysuckle that came in wisps on the evening breeze, causing me to take long deep breaths. The Magnolias, too, are in blossom – my favorite sign of spring for they bring rushing back many wonderful memories. I am reminded of lazy April afternoon moments between classes at Barnard when we’d sprawl beneath the tree on Lehman Lawn and watch the full, pregnant blossoms widen with the warmer weather and float to the ground below. There is nothing so lovely as a girl with a Magnolia blossom tucked and twined in her hair.