So all this grammar talk has got me thinking about rules and memorization and how cool they are. I’m hoping it’s so passe to assert such a thing, that it is cutting edge again. My mom landed a job teaching junior high history recently, and she asked me what I remembered most fondly from my own history class days. “Memorizing things,” I told her. She gasped in a surely-you-jest manner; she is the queen of multisensory, integrated, project-based learning. Maybe if I had gotten to make cheese and debate the Indian Situation and map out exploratory journeys like her students get to do, I would have said that instead.

But no, what I loved most was memorizing the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence (When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…) and the Gettysburg Address (… our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure). We also memorized the Preamble to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I can’t recite any of them wholly, yet their flotsam and jetsam knock against my thoughts as I scrub an elbow in the shower or walk at a certain iambic pace down the sidewalk. I remember my dad’s nonsense versions of pop songs better than the real lyrics, as well as other silly verses he’d recite (Ladies and gentlemen, hoboes and tramps, cross-eyed mosquitos and bow-legged ants…) plus the poem our class memorized in sixth grade (Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows…). Shel Silverstein contributes a fair amount, too (Sarah Sylvia Cynthia Stout would not take the garbage out…).

We did all the things kids usually do in Catechism class at church, including singing songs and staging nativity plays and cutting things out of construction paper and talking about life choices that made Jesus happy; and yet I am most grateful for the many prayers we memorized (light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one in being with the Father, through him all things were made), and the familar phrases of the Mass itself (on the night he was betrayed he took the cup…).

In my late teens, memorizing scriptures carried me through the darkest and most sightless months of depression (do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…), and just the other day I relished singing along with Sinead O’Connor on the radio, from first verse to last (Went to the doctor and guess what he told me, guess what he told me, he said girl you better try and have fun no matter what you do, well he’s a fool, ’cause nothing compares to you…) and Shakespeare’s sonnets often come to mind for no reason (if snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; if hair be wires, then black wires grow upon her head…). These days ee cummings gets me out of bed (i thank You God for most this amazing day, the leaping greenly spirits of trees, the true blue dream of sky…)

This motley collection of words and phrases creates a visceral connection to the history of my nation, my family, my faith, my own rites of passage. I could look any of them up on the internet should I be so moved; but memorized, the words take on a special separate life. They come to me unbidden, out of context, or at just the right moment. They are the voices of my people. It’s only recently that we humans have learned to preserve our most precious words in writing; our bodies are still designed to learn them by heart.