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Fragments From the Memory Log, Entry Four

Children pick up a knowledge or understanding of things in unusual and disjointed ways. I’m talking of how they interpret the underpinnings of the world around them, discovering how things work (machines and the like) or appear to run (such as political systems or any illogical adult behavior). In my own case before the age of seven, there were a few things I remember catching onto fairly quickly and with some semblance of depth. And for the most part I got them right. Most part being the operative phrase here, by the way.

Radio — and so by osmosis television as well — held no special magic for me. A transmitter miles away sends out modulated radio waves that reach the antenna and the changes in frequency are translated by the radio into sound vibrations through the speaker. A slightly more complicated vocabulary than I would have used at seven, but a fair description of how I saw it in my head. I’m still not sure when and where I engrained the details. School was too busy teaching the art of cursive writing and how to reckon the small hand from the big hand. Maybe it was a book, as I took to reading quite young. And there’s a small but unlikely chance it was my parents, though I don’t recall asking those stereotypical kid questions like Why is the sky blue? or How come I can’t swallow my own tongue? Let alone the biggies of where electromagnetism fits in with the weak theory, or why the huge row over Richard Nixon. (I’ve worked that one out)

However I received the truth hidden behind the illusions, there was a logjam in my radio intelligence: listening to music playing through them, I envisioned large gatherings of different bands awaiting their turn to perform before the microphones. Now, I knew how records worked (that’s right young readers, ancient non-CD technology). It helped me to visualize those thin grooves in the vinyl as bumpy physical representations of radio waves. But why I was unable to tie this piece of obvious music hardware to what was going on at a radio station I’ll never figure out. One of those often very personal life mysteries.

Another pothole in the driveway of my thought processes had to do with something a lot more important than radios to many of us: people and the relationships between them. I knew a bit about what people were. And I’m certain I had a good idea what they are made of. Also, I was not without a modicum of those standard skills that allowed me to interact with others, or to sneak through the day without being beat up, antagonized, or even noticed by members of that brutal social order who lord over the playground. Yet they seemed odd, these people. Like they were really not from where I came. Where that would have been I couldn’t have said.

Now I won’t claim I was imaginative enough as a child to fully conceptualize this, but there was a sense that they (being everyone else) were picking up radio transmissions from somewhere, maybe a place light years away, emerging from a distant studio containing a vast gathering of otherworldly beings. The waves modulated in and the frequency changes were picked up and converted to erratic behavior and mood swings and pop quizzes and the need to hum really bad “popular” music. I was one of them, right? So I must have been picking up these signals as well; but something was slipping through, a sort of static that let me notice the lack of any autonomous nature in others. Yet with that special talent to miss the connection, I failed to see it in myself. I guess the nature of being a radio means never really knowing it’s a radio.

I was just a little kid then when I was thinking these things. That’s a good enough excuse. So what would be my excuse now?