Don’t get me wrong, I’m in love with the Harris-Walz ticket. We are overdue for a female president, and her VP pick reminds me of my own foster father, Daddy Jim. He’s the guy who went to work every day and came home with a tiny surprise for me. He drove me to the swimming pond and the ice cream store after Sunday Mass. He built me a doll house out of popsicle sticks! Jim and Nell literally saved my life after our family’s Year of Living Dangerously.
And some of my earliest memories involve leaving our tiny home in Victory Gardens only to realize that other people are weird: I had lunch with a friend and her mother swept the entire kitchen floor after we finished – Jim cleaned the kitchen floor every Saturday. I slept over at a cousin’s house and the grandfather clock kept me awake all night – there was no clock, no bells chiming the hour and half hour in our house at night. And when my foster parents would take me to Scranton to visit the Flapper, well everything was different! I didn’t have to clean my plate for instance, the Flapper said,
“All the more for us!”
She also used to say, “Everybody has a story,” which is probably why I became a journalist. I wanted to capture all the details, to connect all the dots, maybe because my life felt so disconnected – one family in NJ and another in PA. I have a vivid memory of swinging on a dutch door that was in the Flapper’s kitchen, and when I close my eyes I can see a curly-headed blond girl in saddle shoes hanging on the bottom half of a blue door.
This morning I was surprised to read that 1-4% of the population cannot construct an image in their brain. Could you close your eyes and imagine an apple? Well, if you can’t don’t worry, it’s not a disorder, but it does have a name, aphantasia. I was intrigued. I asked Bob, so he closed his eyes and told me yes, he can see an apple. But I pressed on; really, can you actually see one in your mind’s eye? Well, he said he’s not seeing numbers… And the funny thing is, I couldn’t.
Closing your eyes and remembering something is different from conjuring up an object out of thin air. I started thinking in words about my favorite apple from Jefferson’s orchard, Pink Lady, which made me think about the Bride’s wedding on Carters Mountain. I could certainly picture that day, the chuppah blowing in the wind of my mind… but the apple, a simple red (or pink) apple was eluding me. Maybe it’s just ADHD in my head? Maybe I really am weird!
“That would make it really hard to draw anything,” the Pumpkin told me in the pool.
“But really, everybody’s weird, Nanay says. We all sit on the spectrum between hyperphantasia and aphantasia. It’s not only possible but likely that you have a totally different internal experience from someone you walk by on the street. ‘The world—as we see it, smell it, hear it, think about it—is reconstructed,’ Shomstein says. Even a single shared experience, a thought, a memory, or a simple image of an apple can look and feel shockingly different on the mind’s stage.” https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/08/aphantasia-visual-imagination/679427/?gift=MZkyOCULmn5OA_9_ikIP-3k9e9svpxXbPFSNPM4epew&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Now this would seem self-evident, that everybody has their own unique perception of the world. But you’ve got to admit, that Mr T is becoming more and more delusional. I mean come on, to say that Joe Biden will take back the nomination and that the crowd size for a Harris-Walz rally was a conspiracy generated by AI??? Yesterday he insisted on his media platform that the Michigan airplane hangar crowd “DIDN”T EXIST!” I mean I’m almost starting to feel sorry for the guy. He wants his followers to think the picture is fake, just like a good cult leader.
I bet what the ex-president sees when he closes his eyes is a prison cell. We all dream, and some of us daydream, to create our own reality. And sometimes we design perfect, pearl eternity necklaces – pretty weird stuff!
MountainMornings 