Personal memoir of memory anecdotes with no actionable investigative content

4.2.12 WC: 191694 my head as a 55 year old memory association from a high school English class in which we had to memorize the author's various works that we read but probably didn't understand. (To show how little has changed in more than half a century of poor education, my daughter in her sophomore year at Yale had to memorize and spout back on the final exam, the name of British landscape portraits, the year they were painted and the museum in which they hang. It's as if God hadn't invented Google precisely to eliminate such absurd memorization tasks.) A few years earlier, I impressed my children at Steve’s ice cream shop in Cambridge, which offered free ice cream to anyone who could answer really obscure trivial pursuit questions. The question of the month that no one had answered was: “What was the Lone Ranger’s family name? (Most people said “Ranger.”) I immediately blurted out “Reed.” I added that Reed was also the Green Hornet’s family name because according to the “origin story” in a comic book that I had read half a century earlier, they were cousins. During my junior year in high school, my memory for obscure facts and the “parlor tricks” I played with it got me an interview with the producers of a television game show called “The $64,000 question,” but I failed the personality part of the test and was rejected. That was fortunate, since the show was rigged. (I still have the letter from “Production Services Company” at 667 Madison Avenue informing me that the results of my written examination “are gratifying” and inviting me for the personal interview I failed). But my “mother’s memory” has served me well as a lawyer, teacher—and joke teller. (The downside of remembering every joke I ever heard is that I rarely get to hear a “new” joke, because I’ve heard—and told—a good many jokes over my lifetime). I not only remember the jokes I’ve heard (and told and retold) over the years, but more importantly, I remember nearly every case I ever read, nearly every fact in the records of cases and nearly every principle of law I ever learned. I try to teach my students to develop and rely on their memories rather than on their stereotypical skills. During the first two weeks of law school, I forbid my first year students to take any notes (“meturnished”). I assure them that nothing discussed during this “listening” period will be on the exam and I urge them to learn how to listen and remember, because this will be very important in court and other professional settings. Many of the students react nervously because they have never been denied the ability to take notes, but after a few days they acclimate, and some even appreciate, the different regime. My good memory went mostly to waste in my early years, because there was so little worth remembering. We would be given a quarter to memorize passages from holy texts and a dollar if we could recite “by heart” (what does that mean?) an entire chapter from the Bible. Only once did my memory serve me well during my adolescence, and that was at my Bar Mitzvah. Prior to “becoming a man,” I had never really excelled at anything. I was good, but not great, at athletics; good, but not great, with my social life, and God-awful in academics and behavior. But my Bar Mitzvah performance was perfect. I had read the Torah portion—“Judges and Magistrates”—flawlessly, because I was able to memorize the entire reading, melody and all. My performance was the talk of the neighborhood. But a month later, my friend Jerry (now a prominent rabbi) read his Torah portion in the same synagogue. He was awful, making mistake after mistake, and singing off tune. It was embarrassing. The rabbi then got up to give the sermon. He recognized that Jerry had not done well and in order to console him, he referred to 34 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017121