True Tales of the T
A story of life in the real world
I ran into someone on the way to the bus stop this morning. Let’s call her Dr. Deb, because that was her name. We sat together on the bus and chatted about our weekends. Dr. Deb and her boyfriend had gone on a Quest for Piglets in western Massachusetts. (I’m not making this up - he’s into pigs.) It seems there were no piglets, because the pigs still don’t know what season it is. If it’s spring, what happened to winter?
Dr. Deb also mentioned that she’d read 120 pages of a Catherine Asaro novel I’d lent her, and I told her I’d just reread The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Did Dr. Deb react by saying, “You only mention that in order to prove that you’re better than everyone else on the bus”? No, dear reader, she didn’t. She said, “What does ‘bicameral’ mean?” You see, Dr. Deb is my friend. She knows that if I bring something up, it’s because I find it an interesting topic of conversation. My friends give me the benefit of the doubt.
So I told her, “two-chambered.” Did she accuse me of hobbling the English language with my etymological definitions of words? No. Strangely enough, Dr. Deb was interested in discussing left and right hemispheres, not in psychoanalyzing me. The thirty other people on the bus were not my friends, yet none of them started their own conversations about how full of myself I must be to talk about other people’s brains that way. Bostonians have other things on their minds at 8:30 in the morning. Some of them were even reading thick books, but that’s considered normal here. I saw someone reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind on the T a few weeks back - that’s probably what got me thinking about it again after nine years. But back to today:
It is highly unlikely that some random med student on his way to Longwood overheard Dr. Deb and felt that her words oppressed him in his day-to-day use of his left hemisphere - but of course, anything’s possible. If he did, I hope he was relieved when she got off the bus. I stayed on to the T stop at the end of the line, and when I got on the subway, funny, but the other passengers failed to crowd around me. I was just another commuter headed inbound.
But then, I never claimed to be anything else.