my train of thought gets a little off track when i think of the word basil. i don’t know what it is, but there are a few words in the english language which have never come easily. paisley is another one. i could never remember the name for the curly-cue pattern i loved so much, even though i’d often doodle it along the inside edge of my binder while at school. you know, where the lined paper stopped and that little strip of vinyl begged to be decorated with my bic pen (medium point, blue ink, if you’re wondering). i recently learned that the paisley is also called the persian pickle, much easier to remember that. basil is the other one. it’s one of my favourite herbs, right up there with coriander. oddly i’ve never had trouble with that one, it just rolls off the tongue, coriander.
but back to basil. i say the word and my brain seems to pause for just a moment. is that right? did i get the name right? yes, basil. not basil the person’s name, a herb not an “Herb” (and then the spinning rolodex in my mind suddenly stops at Herb, that obnoxious guy on WKRP in cincinnati who wore plaid sports coats a size too small). i can remember all that, but why can’t i easily remember basil?
i got through highschool and university by memorizing the obscene amounts of required information… the periodic table, nomenclature, the classification of living things, the krebs cycle and pretty much all of third year organic chemistry. the organic chemistry prof, lecturing at the front of the class with his pants hiked a little too high, imparted this bit of wisdom regarding the course: “just memorize everything,” he said, waving his hand behind him at the symbols and letters scribbled on the chalkboard. i suspect he’d long gained tenure and academia was just the pesky price he had to pay to allow him to squirrel away in the back of his lab putting his neurons to more noble pursuits than teaching a bunch of undergrads. “there’s no way around it. you wont have time to work through the problems on the exams so just memorize everything,” he said. nice.
memorizing never really came easily for me though. i did it, and did well enough, but rarely by rote. how i envied my classmates who could look at something a few times and just remember it! i usually learned things through a series of associations.
for example, k is the letter for the element potassium in the periodic table. potassium reminded me of possums, which live in australia where there are other animals like koalas and kangaroos. those start with the letter k. therefore, potassium is k.
q.e.d.
(i really don’t know if possums live in australia, to be honest, but it sounded good at the time.)
i sure do love basil though, whatever strange path i may take to remember its name. and i will get around to sharing a couple of the recipes i make using the basil that’s blooming in abundance in my garden right now.
simple recipes by the way. because summer shouldn’t be as complicated as organic chemistry, and cooking in the summer shouldn’t take as many steps as it takes me to get from potassium to k.
