Before I even knew what a meme was, my family established a few of our own. Last Friday at work, one of them actually saved my life. We used to joke about it all the time as a reaction, and although I changed my programmed responses to things more appropriate to my own tastes and proclivities, the old ones remain. From time to time, my sister and I, despite being separated by hundreds of miles, exchange movie lines and memes and remember good times.
Let's start with the one that saved my life, because it could help you too. As part of my new work responsibilities, I'm setting the chemical stockroom in order for Spring term. The position has been vacant for several months, and the intermediary caretakers probably handled only what necessity dictated. I am looking at and into everything. I touched a bottle, unwisely without gloves, of 10M Nitric Acid. It immediately started to burn my right hand between the bottom of the index finger and the thumb. I shoved the hand under water and then buried it into a box of baking soda. Subconsciously I knew this would buffer the acid and help to neutralize it. The acid fumed up, like the volcano experiment of our youth, and for a time I wondered if I'd made a mistake. As the foam subsided, the pain grew, but by the end of the day, my hand was just a firetruck red and didn't hurt unless I put pressure on the wound. I told my parents on Sunday that it popped into my mind right after it happened how we used to say "put baking soda on it" whenever someone was hurt, and that turned out to be the perfect advice.
Just as they do for young people today, memes helped me make friends and maintain family connections. When I started college, I discovered only one person I knew from high school was there too, and she wasn't someone I knew well. I made friends because I knew quotes from two different movies that were popular in our age bracket. Most of my quiet evenings that I share with family involve the swapping of memes and movie quotes. Even when we have nobody around, and at times when we feel lonely in the company of strangers, something about these helps us feel connected, that someone knows what's on our mind and what it means to us.
Almost every significant event of my life is tied to the seminal meme of my youth- The Princess Bride. This cult classic film provided me with friends in high school, introduced me to the woman I married, and now helps me find meaning in the losses I suffered. Even after my burn, lines from that movie came to mind: "Why are you wearing a mask? Were you burned by acid or something like that?" Why yes, now I have been. Although it's been many years since I actually watched it, my family keeps it alive in my life with gifts each year from T-shirts to Cary Ewles' memoir, etc.
The word meme is related to memory. We tie things we like to remember to something that easily evokes them. I've had a good life. Some of the episodes were violent or upsetting or exceptionally difficult. I have failed battles of wit, been defeated by verbal fencing masters and driven into the fire swamps of the mind. Don't worry. I won't let it go to my head. Maybe some day someone will say "as you wish" to me and mean it like Wesley did, for time and all eternity.
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