By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
As you can tell, I love talking about health law & litigation issues, and general wellbeing, if you have any health law questions or better yet, need to refer a case, just call or drop me an email and I will happily talk.
The “Proust Effect.” This week, I got to thinking about what makes us feel happy. In the 1960s, during my childhood, we didn’t have 7-Elevens. We had little country stores with wooden floors, white clapboard siding and a refrigerated drink box, about waist high, with a sliding top you could reach down into and grab a 5-cent soft drink bottle made of real glass. We still then had 20 cents left over, of the weekly allowance my mother would give my brother and I, which we spent on bubble gum and sandwiches; but only after walking a mile down a dirt road to get to the country store —when we were no more than 9 years old.
Every little country store in those days had the same distinctive aroma that came from the soft drink box, a scent that today, even if I walked in blindfolded, would transport me back to the “good old days,” where everything was peaceful and tranquil.
These were simpler times, where 9 year old kids could walk a mile to the store without fear of ending up on a milk carton (and there was no such thing as “child protective services.”)
Instead, we had our Mississippi mothers, who were wiser than us, and had a strict code of criminal procedure that you could pretty much fit on a Cracker Jack box.
Misdemeanors were punishable by docking our allowance. Childhood felonies (like breaking something while “roughhousing” that really aught not be broken), led to threats of corporal punishment (usually a bluff), “I am gonna go break me off a switch,” the much feared “whoopin’ stick” fashioned from a nearby sapling.
Then too, some accessories to crimes carried their own penance and had to be confiscated as contraband by mom (like the day we discovered slingshots at the country store), “you’re gonna put an eye out with that thing.”
I think being transported in time by the smell of a country store, is what is called the “Proust Effect.” The amygdala is responsible for emotional processing, which is highly involved in olfactory senses. And of course, the “first time” we encounter a scent is usually in childhood, and thus more memorable to our tabula rosa blank-slated, little “heathen-child” brains.
That’s why smell-triggered happy childhood memories often feel more emotional and vivid compared to memories triggered by sight or sound. But, just because emotions and memories are strong, doesn’t make them real or accurate. We simply tend to edit out the worry about things that didn’t actually kill us.
Our school days were sometimes spent with “Bert the Nuclear Turtle,” who danced on a screen in a film called “Duck and Cover.” (This was because the Russians were going to drop an atomic bomb on our heads) which Bert the Turtle assured us we could survive by hiding under a desk.
“Fire” was a big player too. “Stop, Drop and Roll,” was a film we were shown in case we ever found ourselves on fire (for some unspecified reason) when mom wasn’t around, likely as not, related to the aforementioned nuclear blast.
Were the good old days really that peaceful? Come to think of it, days gone by weren’t peaceful at all. This sent me off on a search for YouTube videos, to see if there has ever been a time when people weren’t worried about annihilation.
That’s when I found the Weird History Chanel on YouTube and a series entitled “Timeline 1961” (or Timeline 1970”) you get to pick the year you want to search, and it will show you 30 minutes of clips what was happening that year, and in particular what scared the bejesus out of everyone in any chosen year.
After watching a number of these, the fact that we are still here at all, seems cause enough to celebrate. (Which is oddly comforting.)
The Valentine Myth of “Halcyon Days.” Turns out, when it comes to romance, which is a big topic this Saturday, good times ebb and flow. The phrase “Halcyon Days,” is defined as periods marked by the feeling of peacefulness and tranquility, which comes from a Greek Mythological tale of Alkyone, who threw herself into the sea, because her husband had been killed in a shipwreck.
This moved the gods to come to the couple’s aid and transform both Alkyone and her lost husband into kingfisher birds, which were said to build floating nests on seas, which the gods would calm for 14 days around the winter solstice for mating purposes. Accordingly, these calm periods for lovebirds are called “Halcyon Days.”
It’s a nice story, but it is factually, total bullshit. Nearly as I can tell, making a nest on a open sea in order to mate, is about the dumbest thing any pair of birds could do. Consequently, no bird species actually do this. It is just a nice lie we tell ourselves to recognize a happy place in a world full of reasons to be unhappy.
Which may be the point of the story. Life and romance is full of great wonder and unspeakable unpleasantness, you can make yourself happy or miserable, depending on which one you spend your time thinking about it at any given moment. This is sometimes your choice and sometimes not.
But if you can find a place that makes you feel happy for a moment with your Valentine, perhaps a simple country store at the end of a dirt road, recognize it for the gift it is, and try to visit there more often.