The human memory is a black box, we know things go in it, we know that we can sometimes retrieve what we know -- sometimes we know we know something, but we can't retrieve it at the moment, sometimes we forget things completely, and sometimes we forget things temporarily, and then they return to the surface of our consciousness spontaneously at a later time -- for instance, you'd think that if two kids came into your classroom, politely asked you if you had ever seen a "baby-freeze," and then when you said "no," they made sure of this (you've never seen one on MTV or YouTube? I didn't bother to tell them that I hadn't watched MTV since the mid-'90's . . . the days of The Real World and Beavis and Butthead) and then asked if you'd like to see a "baby-freeze" and then -- when you said, "sure," they broke down into two frozen and contorted positions -- creating a strange tableau . . . one kid with his face on the ground, propped on his arms, his legs in the air, the other kid with his arms propped on the desk and the rest of his body floating frozen in the air -- and they held this pose for twenty seconds or so, and then unfroze themselves, thanked me and went on their way . . . and this all happened at 7:15 AM and then I taught three classes in a row -- three different classes -- which erases my brain of just about everything, and so I never told anyone what happened, and I didn't even remember what happened until several days ago, when I was walking back from a lovely lunch with my wife in Chatham -- without the kids -- and the image came back to me, but I wondered if I had the term right: "baby freeze" and it turns out that's what it's called and I've provided an image or two so you can see it, and if you want to learn, there are plenty of YouTube tutorials . . . but it's harder than it looks (and it looks hard).
