I've Got a Mega Memory

 A long time ago, our family invested in a series of audio cassettes called "Mega-Memory". I was enthralled with how the brain worked and how to improve what I had.

 Although I wasn't a very good student, I would almost ace every test that I was given. I did not enjoy homework at all. My belief was that if they wished me to be schooled on my time, they ought to come over to my house and make sure it got done. That never happenned, so I ended up failing some classes that graded heavily on homework. For that reason, we started the MM course.

 I'm not sure how that was going to help me do homework, but the subject matter was so interesting that I gladly sat at the dining room table, with pen and paper at the ready when Dad would play the tapes.

 The first lessons had to deal with 'pegs'. The narrator had likened them to wooden dowels, but once I heard the word 'pegs upon a wall', my wild imagination had put pirates on the other side with only their peg-legs sticking out from what we were seeing.

 These pegs were static of nature. Each number was given an image. They are as follows

 1. Tree
 2. Light Switch
 3 Stool
 4. Car
 5. Glove
 6. Revolver
 7. Dice
 8. Skate
 9. Cat
10. Bowling Pin
11. Field Goal posts
12. Carton of eggs
13. Cauldron
14. Golden ring
15. Paycheck
16. Cake
17. Magazine
18. Voting booth
19. Golf Club
20. Black Piano Keys

 The symbols for one through ten are what we were to use to remember strings of numbers, like phone numbers and addresses. The 11 through twenty I used when remembering long lists of objects or words. These pegs were so cool to me, that they've stuck in my mind from that first day of learning. A great gift, those memory tricks. Here's how I would remember the number 867-5309, if the song, "Jenny" had never come out.

 8-Skate. Now I would usually imagine someone skating, but that would not be memorable enough to recall from my databank, so I had to make it ludicrous. I would see an ice skate with eyeballs for eyelets and a lolling tongue, sliding around, looking for it's mate.

 6-Revolver. I would then see the skate find it's mate, only to view it's last moments at the end of a mean-faced revolver. The gun would laugh once the dead skate had fallen through the ice, taking it's mate with it to the afterlife.

 7-Dice. The revolver would then find money that belonged to the pair of skates and use it to play at a craps table. When throwing the dice the first time, one of the cubes would lodge into the barrel causing the revolver to stop up.

 5-Glove. The gun got so angry at the die sticking itself in it's snub-nose, that it tried firing. The bullet and dice would fly from the barrel, only to be caught by a disembodied white glove, and stuffed back into the revolver.

 3. Stool. The revolver would get very angry at the glove for stuffing back the bullet and die. It would be smoking to the point of making the metal all red. To calm down the gun would sit upon a three-legged stool. After cooling down for a moment, the revolver would then try to get up, only to find that the stool had been lined with adhesive, and stuck to this gun-butt.

 0. Bowling Pin. In a fit of rage, the gun grabbed the first thing available to knock the die and stool loose. You're right, it was a bowling pin that started eating his arms when he went to grab it.

 9. Cat. Morris the cat was in attendance at this particular cat table and proceeded to stop all the action with a very loud growl/hiss combo that sent all objects scattering. He would then clean himself and purr away.

 Not only did this course that my father had purchased help my memory, it was something that fostered my imagination as well.

 Now if I could only get past the first sentence of the speed reading course, I'd be able to read 1000 blogs a day!