I Remember . . . Sometimes

By James M. Jackson

The third week in July was one of those weeks that I would just as soon not repeat. I won’t bore you with the details of all the things that went wrong. Included in the week’s unpleasantness were a failed attempt to remove an old truck camper from property I recently purchased that left the camper junk, a flat tire on my truck—the third in the month—and the low tire pressure warning appeared at 4:30 in the morning while I was driving to a 5K in a city 70 miles away.

The incidents I will tell you about all involved my brush hog, which I pull behind an ATV. The brush hog, which I have named “Chomper,” is the tool I use to keep the larger trails on my property under control and eliminate the trees and bushes that want to overrun meadows.

One of my lake neighbors had ankle surgery and so the couple could not come to camp for two weeks. They maintain a lawn around their place. So, as a friendly gesture, I figured I would use Chomper to lop off some of the grass, so when they came up, they’d only have to make one pass with their lawnmower. As I passed by a small balsam tree (say four or five feet high), Chomper’s frame snagged a couple of branches, which I didn’t know until I felt a large drag. Chomper pulled the entire tree from the ground. Balsam don’t have tap roots and our ground is rocky, so the roots are only a few inches underground, making this feat possible. To compound matters, when I backed up to disentangle the tree from Chomper, it forced additional tree branches to jam the equipment.

An hour later, balsam removed from Chomper, I was back to mowing the lawn and soon caused disaster number two. These neighbors have solar panels on a pole some distance from their cabin. So do I. However, I buried the cables that run from my solar panels to the inverter and battery bank. Yep, you guessed it: the neighbors’ cables lay along the ground. Those cables had easy disconnect clips, so before mowing the neighbors could (and did) move both ends of the wires out of the way. Thinking about who knows what, I drove over the wires and performed a more brutal disconnect process, one that left the wires in multiple pieces.

I mowed the remainder of the lawn with no further incidents and took the brush hog to clear a logging trail running across the new land I had purchased. I had already used a chain saw to remove all downed trees and large limbs that crossed that logging road, but small trees had encroached from both road edges, just the kind of task Chomper performs well. Until the blades found a big rock I had not seen. I mentioned we have rocky land, so the blades routinely catch rocks and need periodic sharpening. With a big rock, the drive belt hops off its assembly (hopefully) or breaks. Either way, without an engaged drive belt, I was doing no more cutting.

Okay, fine, I figure the gods didn’t want me finishing that project that day. It was getting too hot anyway. My neighbor is more mechanically inclined than I am. Most of the world is more mechanically inclined than I am. That weekend, after he had mowed the lawn (and my work did save him time, and he had cables to replace those I had cut, so they still had power), we discovered the belt hadn’t broken (yay!) and after some struggle was back in place. Then he noticed that when I had replaced a wheel a while back, I had not included a spacer washer on the axle. (Remember Mr. Mechanically Challenged—who knew there was supposed to be one?). That missing washer meant the wheel had been rubbing against the cotter pin that held it on, and that wheel was soon destined to fall off.

So much for my plans to finish clearing that trail on the newly purchased property. I’d look up the part. Amazon could deliver it next week and even I could manage that repair—well, maybe, if I could figure out a way to punch out the ruined cotter pin.

My neighbor also pointed out that I had left the key in the control box that was sitting on Chomper. If I rode around like that, the bumps would dislodge the key. Not a problem, I said. Whenever I use Chomper, I bungee-cord the control box onto the back rack of the ATV.

We talked about plans for later that day, I hitched my ATV to Chomper, and towed it home. Remembering, 300-yards later, that I hadn’t secured the control box to the back of the ATV (because I wasn’t turning Chomper on). Sure enough, the control box had shaken off Chomper and dislodged the key, which, even after going over the ground several times, remains missing.

In my younger years, I claimed the memory of a large, fast computer. My brain’s hard drive was nearly flawless and had excellent storage and retrieval mechanisms for new information. Now that hard drive has multiple bad sectors with lost data. The store and retrieve mechanism still work—when it wants to—other times it overwrites recent data with even newer data and the distracted result is running over wires lying on the ground or forgetting to secure Chomper’s control box before driving off.

During the period of this trauma, I read a novel. When I finished it, I went to record it in the Excel spreadsheet that contains information about all the books I’ve read since beginning high school and discovered I had read the book eight years earlier. I had no memory of it. That brought me to recollecting the situation of one of my parents’ friends. He was one of the nicest people I’ve met. As a senior, he suffered a disease that left him with functional short-term memory that lasted only a week to ten days. He still retained much of his knowledge and old memories. That allowed him to be very functional, and if you asked what he had for breakfast three days ago, he had no problem remembering. Unfortunately, anything he had done two weeks ago was lost to him.

He adjusted in ways that amazed me (who, at the time, still had that large, fast computer memory). He loved to read and determined that he only needed seven excellent books on his bookshelf. By the time he finished the seventh, he’d forgotten the first and could cycle back to it.

This, while I still remember, brings me to the question I wanted to ask you:

If you knew you wouldn’t keep a memory of any new books you read for longer than two weeks, what books would be your favorites to read, and read anew, and read again, fresh as if it was hot off the press?

 * * * * *

James M. Jackson authors the Seamus McCree series. Full of mystery and suspense, these thrillers explore financial crimes, family relationships, and what happens when they mix. To learn more information about Jim and his books, check out his website, https://jamesmjackson.com. You can sign up for his newsletter (and get to read a free Seamus McCree short story).