Nature and Discovered Memory

Wow, that title sounds like some academic text book, but it's way simpler than that. First the nature, from Mary:

Mary says: I had to take this picture of the mahonia bush at the back of the yard - it's a prickly spiny evergreen, and these spikes of yellow flowers are really impressive on a sunny clear day like today. It's a beautiful day and I had brunch on capitol hill, so the drive home was so lovely I kept reminding myself how lucky I am to live in such a pretty city.

And now for discovered, or probably recovered memory: I am pleasantly immersed in this Steven King book about time travel and trying to prevent the JFK assasination. The way this particular time travel works is that it always takes the person to the same day in September 1958. The man tests things a few times so he has made various trips back to 1958. Some of the things he encounters are very familiar to me, such as the music, the cars, the prices, but some, such as the language, is a little too early for me. I was too young then to appreciate the Beatnik culture (other than, of course, Maynard G. Krebs on Dobie Gillis).

At one point, he goes into a soda shop and orders a root beer where the small was 5 cents, and the large was 10 cents. Yes, I remember those prices -- and then how it was raised to 15 cents for small and 25 cents for large.

But I digress. A detail that I had totally forgotten about is that he is in a grocery store and talks about the manager's office being on a raised platform so the manager could see the whole store at once. That was so clear to me, and it is something I hadn't thought of in years. I can still see the little stairs that led up to the manager's glassed in cubicle overlooking the store. I wonder why they stopped that -- maybe because stores got so big that you couldn't see the whole thing at once anyway.