Has anyone seen my memory?

It's funny what sort of tricks the memory can play on you. I was reading Lars Walker's  book, Troll Valley  (which I'll review later this week), and early on came across a throw-away line about a book called "Mama's Bank Account", later made into a movie called "I Remember Mama". He said that the book almost never mentioned church. My mind came to a full stop, while it processed this, because I thought that "I Remember Mama" was absolutely packed full of church references.

Fortunately, my mind started again after a couple of moments, and I remembered that I don't think I actually read "Mama's Bank Account," though I once saw portions of "I Remember Mama" on TV. The books that I was thinking of were called "Papa's Wife", and "Papa's Daughter", by Thyra Ferre Bjorn. Those were entirely different books (for one thing, the family involved were Swedish, rather than Norwegian), though the theme's probably similar, from what I remember. It's probably been a good twenty years since I read those books, though. I probably should look them up to see if the library has them (I have looked them up at B & N, and they aren't available as an eBook).

I'd say it's a pain getting old, but I think my mind always tended to mix together things of a similar theme like that. Then again, it's my provenly faulty memory telling me so. ;-)

Dominant Eye

Have you ever taken the dominant eye test? Apparently it consists of holding your arm straight out, and covering up a distant object with your thumb. Then you close your eyes one at a time, and see which eye makes the thumb move. The other eye is then your dominant eye.

I think I first heard about this test in high school, but it doesn't work for me. Every time it comes up, I try it, and I get frustrated, and other people get frustrated trying to explain it to me.

When I hold my thumb out at arm's length, and look at distant objects, I do not see one thumb, I see two. Both are transparent, neither of which can actually be said to "cover" that object. I can cover it with my whole hand, my hand's large enough that I get a significant overlap between the two hand images that I see.

Conversely, I can look at my thumb, instead of the distant object. Then I only see one thumb, but see two distant objects. I can cover either one of those up with my thumb, but the other is still out bright and clear.

I looked up other tests for finding the dominant eye. One consists of holding your hands out together, overlapping and leaving a hole between your thumbs and forefingers, then centering the distant object in the hole. Once again, I see two holes. I can look at the object through either hole, but to center it, I'd actually put it behind the fleshy bridge between the holes.

I don't know if I just don't have a dominant eye, or something else weird is going on. But for between 20 and 30 years, I've been trying to do this, and have only gotten frustrated. I don't know why it works for other people, if their mind suppresses the image of one of the thumbs, or what.

Slipping

The snow and pack ice was all cleared off the front porch, but when I stepped on the porch the other morning, I nearly fell from the glaze ice. It looked like it was caused by the drip from the roof.