A Slice of Memory
TYO HUV MYTA HUWOX OXTVUY...
It is funny how we prioritize memory. We sift through logically important pictures and retain apparently random ones. We are librarians of odd collections. Unalphabetized, unordered. Asynchronous, non-chronological.
I cannot forget these letters. A list of black letters on a white board in our school clinic. A simple eye test. For me it is much more- the image pressbuttons me through a flipbook of school memories.
The first thing I gather during my memory retrodrive is that I was about twelve when I first came across that board. And the second thing is the doctor.
The doctor. We believed that he shared his face with the English teacher and a contract worker at our school. He visited our school every month for mass checkups. During such events, among regular doctoric antics ('show your tonsils', 'breathe this way and that', 'let me tickle your chest'), he would choose his subject with indifferent randomness and deftly hook his forefinger onto the waistband of our P.E. Shorts. To our consternation, he would pull it to glance inside, and before the elastic snapped back to the waistskin, his hand would already be busy on a health report. Fury! He just peeked at our crotch and our vocabulary did not contain an appropriate opinion. What would we have said? “Doctor! But why the watchy-watchy below the tomachi?”
But his face would remain motionless. A dead face. Formidable. Definitely not somebody who welcomed a humor pill. No sir. He’s in his suit and tie, ‘scope, briefcase, and a full-grown moustache. A person too important for a jokey poke.
How is that possible though? We were in our adolescent primes. We were a wealth of variation, ranging from huge to tiny, fat to skinny, and clean to odious and filthy. All hell were breaking loose in our body- hairy patches everywhere, intermittent squeaks in our speech. Didn't Deadface see anything there that did not fit the body’s rest of geography?
So I gave him a feared reverence.
TYO... HUV... MYTA... HUWOX… OXTVUY. It had not taken me long to realize that all the letters were laterally invertible. Hardly waiting for Deadface’s cue, I would scoot over to where I could see the letters on the mirror on the opposite wall. I would read it dutifully, once for each eye. It was of no use because I could say it all with my eyes closed. My smartass mind would be whispering the answers: TYO… HUV… MYTA… HUWOX…
If only I could somehow peer into his face closelyand start chanting "TYO... HUV... MYTA HUWOX... OXTVUY". A friendly invitation to laugh indulgently. He would probably slip into a smile and bellow from his tummy.No more deadface charade, you know?
It is funny how we prioritize memory. We sift through logically important pictures and retain apparently random ones. We are librarians of odd collections. Unalphabetized, unordered. Asynchronous, non-chronological.
I cannot forget these letters. A list of black letters on a white board in our school clinic. A simple eye test. For me it is much more- the image pressbuttons me through a flipbook of school memories.
The first thing I gather during my memory retrodrive is that I was about twelve when I first came across that board. And the second thing is the doctor.
The doctor. We believed that he shared his face with the English teacher and a contract worker at our school. He visited our school every month for mass checkups. During such events, among regular doctoric antics ('show your tonsils', 'breathe this way and that', 'let me tickle your chest'), he would choose his subject with indifferent randomness and deftly hook his forefinger onto the waistband of our P.E. Shorts. To our consternation, he would pull it to glance inside, and before the elastic snapped back to the waistskin, his hand would already be busy on a health report. Fury! He just peeked at our crotch and our vocabulary did not contain an appropriate opinion. What would we have said? “Doctor! But why the watchy-watchy below the tomachi?”
But his face would remain motionless. A dead face. Formidable. Definitely not somebody who welcomed a humor pill. No sir. He’s in his suit and tie, ‘scope, briefcase, and a full-grown moustache. A person too important for a jokey poke.
How is that possible though? We were in our adolescent primes. We were a wealth of variation, ranging from huge to tiny, fat to skinny, and clean to odious and filthy. All hell were breaking loose in our body- hairy patches everywhere, intermittent squeaks in our speech. Didn't Deadface see anything there that did not fit the body’s rest of geography?
So I gave him a feared reverence.
TYO... HUV... MYTA... HUWOX… OXTVUY. It had not taken me long to realize that all the letters were laterally invertible. Hardly waiting for Deadface’s cue, I would scoot over to where I could see the letters on the mirror on the opposite wall. I would read it dutifully, once for each eye. It was of no use because I could say it all with my eyes closed. My smartass mind would be whispering the answers: TYO… HUV… MYTA… HUWOX…
If only I could somehow peer into his face closelyand start chanting "TYO... HUV... MYTA HUWOX... OXTVUY". A friendly invitation to laugh indulgently. He would probably slip into a smile and bellow from his tummy.No more deadface charade, you know?
posted by Milan at 7:41 PM
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