When the Light Comes On

There are so many physical feelings we have no names for at all. What does the interim feel like between the time you stub your toe and the time it starts to hurt? What is the feeling you get just before a muscle begins to cramp? What’s a good name for the way the oak flavor of a red wine differs from the last little burn of the tannins?

I have some mental events I’d like to have names for. What do you call it when you almost remember something? What is the little signal you get when you might have reversed the digits in a number and you have to look to be sure?

Since I like puns, one of my favorite “mental events” has to do with available meanings. Since this matters to me, I have had to call it something. I have invented a way to describe this event. I don’t know what relationship it has to the actual mental event. They both have a sequence, I guess. One thing comes before another. One thing predicts another. That’s probably all.


I call it a red light. I think I have in mind something like the “Check Engine” light on a car dashboard. Something like this picture, but without the speedometer. The value of it is that I can tell when it is on and when it is not. If it is on, the word I will need at the end of the sentence—the word that will hijack the meaning the sentence would otherwise have had—will be there by the time I get to the end of the sentence. There is nothing about this light coming on that tells me what the word is. The light tells me that it will be there when I need it.

Over the years, I have come to trust it. I don’t remember that it has ever disappointed me. Still, I do feel the tension of it. I have to overcome something to keep myself lurching toward the end of the sentence without knowing what the word is. I remember dealing myself into a conversation about fishing, for instance. I didn’t know when I started that I was going to borrow the “unreasonable sturgeon seizure” clause of the Fourth Amendment to talk about fishing. I just headed down the path, knowing something would be there for me at the end of it, and when I got there, I heard “unreasonable sturgeon seizure” at the same time everyone else did. It felt like hearing a joke told by someone else.

I haven’t ever had an “out of body experience.” This mysterious red light is likely as close as I am going to get. Still, it’s pleasant. It may very well be unique. After all these years I do trust it. Part of that trust, I am sure, comes from the fact that I have no control over it at all. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know when it will come on. I don’t know whether it will be a witty or an atrocious pun.

But when the red light comes on, Ihave faith.