Jingle Bells and memory

Mary reports a sighting of Graham singing Jingle Bells. This might not strike you as remarkable, save for the fact that last Xmas he was 1 and change and not speaking at all. OK, it's true that Natalie like to sing Christmas Carols all year long (despite the lesson she should have learned from Elmo Christmas, a Sesame Street version of Groundhog Day), and we do sing carols in the car to calm Graham down when he's freaking the fuck out.

(I confirmed Graham's command of Jingle Bells this morning, subsequent to the initial drafting of this post, when I entered the room of crabby "I puked my guts out last night" Graham and charmed him into submission with his favorite Xmas carol.)

But still, he's got a monstrous good memory. Corroborated by the testimony of his speach therapist. Not unlike his father's memory back in the day, prior to the time he took up with tha kine on a more than once a day basis for about 7 years.

Songs are a typical case of rhyme as a mnemonic device: Graham knows rhyming words and the words at ends of sentences. Compare with Natalie, who came away from watching a They Might be Giants kids video singing this little ditty:

If you see a Christmas tree or a stack of newspapers or a 2x4 frame of a house
It's probably made from pine trees and pine trees are conifers, that's what this song is about
Or if you see a plant in the shape of an elephant, or in the shape of a dog
It's probably a shrub, a conifer shrub pruned into that shape by someone

There we have a song without rhyme or real meter, nothing to hold on to, a self-consciously avant-garde affair, designed to create mnemonic links out of logical rather than physical connections. And Natalie was down with it. She doesn't know a 2x4 from squat, but she learned the song and is piecing it all together. But she wouldn't sing it for Mary later.