The Teflon Mind

Here’s an odd little slice of life story.

This is the kind of story that lots of people like to hear -- some because it reminds them of something, and some just so they can say “Sounds like somebody has a little too much free time on their hands…”

OK. Fair enough. Maybe so. Now, on with the story.

When I was a kid, naturally I loved watching TV. I think for quite a stretch I was banned from watching TV on weeknights, so Friday nights were almost holy for me. I’d zip myself up in a sleeping bag and watch TV till I couldn’t keep my eyelids up any longer. Then I’d just lay there and listen -- eventually, flags would wave just beyond my eyelids, anthems would play, and then I'd wake up to this test pattern with an Indian in the middle.

This was in the three-networks-and-a-local, pre-remote control days, by the way. I really don’t remember much about whatever junk was on the tube on Friday nights in the mid 60’s. “The Munsters” may have been involved, and they weren’t re-runs, either.

But I do have one incredibly vivid memory of something I saw one night. I was maybe eight or nine years old, and the memory of it seared itself into my brain so fully, so clearly, that ever after, and to this day, I can recall this thing as if I were watching it on a TV screen right now.

I wish I could say it was something like the Nixon-Kennedy debate, or the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or the Apollo moon landing. Afraid not.

What got stuck in my brain was just a short scene from a cheesy low budget science fiction movie. Not the whole movie, mind you, just this one scene. The movie had something to do with some astronaut guy stranded on some harsh distant planet. Even at the time, I knew it was cheesy and low budget, possibly because even at age eight or nine, I could tell that the guy’s “spacesuit” looked suspiciously like a surplus US Air Force flight suit, and his “space helmet” looked a lot like an Air Force flight helmet.

In this one particular scene, the astronaut guy happened upon a pool of water on this hostile planet. And in the pool of water was some kind of plant life with seed pods that he could eat.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing, that’s all I remembered. I didn’t remember anything else from that movie, and I certainly didn’t remember the movie’s title. But I remembered that one scene so vividly; it just stuck to my brain like it was glued there.

And for the next forty years, I kind of scouted for this scene from this movie again, maybe just to make sure I hadn't imagined it in the first place. Any time I was channel surfing and I came across an old movie that had anything to do with any kind of astronaut on any kind of foreign planet, I’d watch the damn thing -- waiting to see if maybe this was the one.

Years after the original “Planet of the Apes” had achieved retro-cult status, I watched that movie again. I barely remembered “Planet of the Apes”, so for a brief moment at the beginning, when the astronauts had crash landed on a “foreign planet”, I was sure this was it. But it wasn’t.

Years of casual late night TV watching rolled by – now I could watch TV even on school nights, if I wanted to, you see. So I always kept an eye out for this mystery movie.

I never spotted it, yet I could never seem to forget it, either.

Then it finally happened. Within a few days of my forty-eighth birthday, I was flipping through the satellite movie channels, and I landed on a cheesy vintage sci-fi movie about some astronaut-like guy in a cheesy vintage Air Force flight suit, struggling to survive on a hostile alien planet. And he found a pool of water, and….well, you know.

The point of the story being – isn’t it strange how the mind works?

I couldn’t tell you a single thing about, say, my bedroom when I was eight or nine years old. The bed frame, any posters on the wall, the chest of drawers – I must have had all those things, but I remember nothing about them. I don’t remember who my teacher was that year. I couldn’t tell you who my best friend was. I can’t recall the face of my beloved babysitter without a photograph in my hand. But for forty years I remembered that little scene from that totally forgettable old movie.

Why?

And wouldn’t it be nice if we had a little more control over that sort of thing? The ability to pick and choose which memories stick, and which ones slide off of our brains like they were made of Teflon. Oh, well.

The movie, by the way, was “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” – made in 1964.
Hell yes, I taped it.


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058530/