Entertaining Speaker #4 - A Dramatic Talk
Oct 19, 1984
Mm. Contestmaster, fellow Toastmasters, and guests – My mind has a secret from that night, that it won’t tell me.
A motley group of middle-schoolers, dressed for the crisp Fall weather, along with some parents, including my father.
They’re sitting on a wooden flat-bed wagon covered in loose hay, pulled by an old farm tractor.
Most are sitting on the right side, talking in loose cliques.
On the left side is a short kid, glasses, plain brown hair, camouflage pants once his father’s. This is me. I’m 14, in 8th grade.
I’m enjoying the first activity of the church youth group retreat: the hayride.
Lost in my own world, I watch the ground slip beneath me. In the corner of my eye I see the front tire spinning, almost hypnotically.
I’m sitting on the edge, legs dangling off the side, swaying from the rumble-rough ride of worn wheels on uneven ground.
The scattered conversations are a muted murmuring. I hear the whispers of my thoughts, punctuated by sound of my own breathing,
(Inhale)
(Exhale)
I blink, (close eyes) everything goes black
I open my eyes (open eyes)…
… and I’m on the ground, half under the wagon! I don’t know how I got here!
Bewildered, I roll my head to the right, and see the rear wheels bearing down on me!
(Aside: Mental pathways)
The mind is like the business district in a modern city. There are office buildings, which are where the work gets done, such as the visual cortex. There are libraries, for memory storage. Connecting it is the Mental Courier service, which moves information and thoughts around the city.
New information is given to a mental courier, who whisks it to the appropriate processing center. Someone speaks to us, and the language data is taken by courier to the Language Building, for analysis and action.
The cerebral city is largely constructed during our first few years of. Moreover, office space and worker training is prioritized acccording to our experiences and needs. For example, my speech center has a great deal of space and worker training dedicated to English.
For less common information, fewer city resources are provided. I’ve studied Russian, and I’ve got some Russian workers, but they only work half-days and the couriers have trouble finding them in the Language building.
In situations radically different from anything experienced before can’t properly analyze the data. Given strange information, the workers frantically try to process it, and generally fail. Productivity fails, and we experience mental lockup. Our thoughts are scattered, the workers’ best-guesses. We are stuck until we figure it out, or the situation passes us by.
In the most traumatic situations our mind uses a special self-preservation procedure. If a courier determines the information is too stressful to be processed it is taken directly to the mental archives, bypassing the processing step. Then, in a sublime display of self-deception, the location of the memory is discarded, the courier sworn to secrecy. Though the information, the memories, are archived, the location is lost, leaving a gap in our mental history.
I experienced both of these cases on that fateful night.
Let’s return to the young David.
Back to the little boy
I don’t know how I got here. The ground is hard, cold, unforgiving. I see the inexorable rear wheel bearing down on me, but it’s a thousand miles away. Which is good because I have no experience being run over by a flatbed wagon, and all my brain has to offer is, "This can’t happen. I can’t be run over."
The wheel isn’t that far away. It happens. WHAM! My abdomen is an ineffectual speedbump. The wagon with my friends, my father!, leaves me behind in the night.
I am distraught. My stomach is ablaze with pain. My mind is urgently whispering something about my right leg. I try to lift up to see my leg, to make sense of … something. Then my dad is over me, gently pressing me flat.
The rest of the night is a fog
I’m on the ground, my friends surrounding me
I’m in the back seat of a station wagon…so tired…my dad keeping me awake
Hospital, Morphine
Interminable ambulance ride
Coming out of surgery
My parents faces drawn with anxiety, but eyes clear with relief.
My abdomen was only externally bruised; I had tread marks for a week. My right leg was more seriously injured, but was put right over the next two months. And a few months after that, I was physically back to normal. But mentally, something was missing – there was a memory gap. I couldn’t answer the question, "What happened?".
Now, 15 years later, I have a large scar, but I rarely notice it. But sometimes it makes me realize that I still don’t know, "What happened." A half-second moment is missing, stealing the answer from me.
Well, that’s not quite right. The answer to "What happened" is in here, but my mind has hidden it, perhaps forever.
