July 1, 2025
Just Saying…
Walking Beans, Hippocampus, and Reliving July of ’66
By Q.C. Jones
Memories, my mind is overflowing with memories. After reading an article and discovering the “hippocampus” a spark was ignited. Thinking more, perhaps it wasn’t as much a spark as a Fourth of July Firecracker explosion. Not the pop of a tiny “lady finger” firecracker, nor the louder report of a 2 inch “Black Cat” but the massive report of a giant “sky buster” used to snap the riverside crowd of our fair city during a major pyrotechnic show.
Hippo, hippopotamus, hippocampus, it was the word that caused my subconscious mind to do a double take. For readers who aren’t biology professors, or brain surgeons, the hippocampus (which sounds more like a zoo escapee than a brain part) is a small but crucial structure in the brain, deeply involved in memory, spatial navigation, and learning, especially the formation of long-term memories.
The hippocampus is the brain’s filing system, converting short-term experiences into long-term memories and helping us recall them later. It also interacts with other parts of the brain to link memories with emotion, and to consolidate them during sleep. The good news is, the hippocampus is one of the few regions of the adult brain capable of generating new neurons. Some believe exercising the hippocampus by recalling old memories refreshes and rebuilds the memory.
With all this scientific mumbo-jumbo behind us, allow me to pull back the curtain and allow you to witness my Richard Simmons-esque hippocampus “Sweating with the Oldies’ Memory.”
It was my summer of my 12th year. I typically spent my summers working at my dad’s Texaco Station where I served as a carwash boy, pump jockey, and cleaner. I had a lot of interaction with the public, and one of the people I met was a local farmer named Eldo Harold.
Eldo was a soft-spoken and friendly guy who occasionally stopped by the station to buy oil for his tractors and sometimes drink a cold coke from the pop machine in the corner of the station. During one of these visits, Eldo asked if I might be interested in working for him in the next couple of weeks. He told me the job paid a buck an hour and lunch and extended for most of the daylight hours unless it rained or was too hot.
On the way home from work with my dad, I told him about the offer and his words are still vivid. “At a dollar an hour, you can’t afford not to work for him. If you work 10 hours a day for a couple of weeks, you’ll have a really nice nest egg for college.” I phoned Mr. Harold up that night and said, I am ready to start.
A couple of days later, Eldo called and said show up at my house before eight tomorrow morning. I was surprised to learn most of the kids helping were at least three or four years older than me and seasoned veterans of walking beans.
For those of you who missed this teenage rite of passage, here’s some background. Back in the day, before herbicides turned bean fields into chemical battlefields, farmers had to clean crops the hard way. Grain elevators didn’t look kindly on loads laced with weed seeds. There were dockage fees for weed which could be expensive. Having rows of weed-free beans was a matter of pride, reputation, and survival.
Armed with meticulously sharpened homemade weed hooks, we marched through fields of soybeans row by row, like infantry on patrol. Unending monotony tied to these endless rows of beans was the enemy.
It was dirty work under a blistering July sky. There was no shade and no mercy. Being fair skinned and prone to sunburn I wore long sleeve shirts and a wide brimmed hat. The others made fun of me, but two of them got sun poisoning.
I learned to hate cocklebur, pigweed, velvetleaf, and the evilest, smart weed. The scalding air buzzed with horseflies and the occasional curse from a kid who caught in cocklebur.
The only respite came at the end of each mile of walking when we collapsed in the shade of Eldo’s pickup to suck down water for exactly 10 minutes. Then it was back into the sun and another row of beans.
Since we started with an introduction to the hippocampus, allow me one more dalliance. After ten hours of walking through endless rows of weedy beans, when I closed my eyes to sleep, I had reoccurring dreams, maybe even nightmares of endless bean rows.
These dreams have shown up in new studies and are called the Tetris Effect which is a hypnagogic hallucination. Basically, it’s your brain’s way of playing cruel reruns when you’d rather be just dreaming.
I guess I can now claim a psychiatric condition.
Just Saying.
