I was just reading about La Befana, the old Italian witch who flies on her broom through the night on January 5th, the eve of the Epiphany, and leaves presents for children in their stockings. Just as some leave out cookies and a bev for Santa, the Italians leave a special cake for their witch. The Befana cake is a fruity golden cake with (of course) a dash of spirit and there are as many regional recipes for it as for the Mexican molé.
What caught my eye was that the Italians hide a coin inside their Befana cakes and whoever finds it will be lucky all year. I was immediately transported back to the Halloweens of my childhood and the barm brack my mother would bake - a dense dark fruity cake in which she would hide a ring wrapped in tinfoil. Tradition had it that whoever found the ring would be married within the year. Being the youngest in my family and the only girl, my parents and all my brothers would go to whatever lengths necessary to make sure it was I who got the ring. I knew they did this but I was still excited each time to find it in my slice of brack. That ring has a lot to answer for.
Memory is a powerful force. I was talking with an English friend of mine recently. He was a cabbie in London back in the day, so he had The Knowledge. Before googlemaps, this was the hardearned ability of London cabbies to take a fare from any point A to any point B in London using only their mental maps of the city. Having lived in London for several years, and harboring a big love for that city and especially its cabbies, I listened spellbound as he told me how he acquired The Knowledge.
Cabbies in training would drive their cab all week but in their spare time and evenings, they would do ‘Callouts.’ This involved picking one of 164 detailed routes through the city, learning them by heart, and then traveling them on a moped (small motorbike). The cabbies before him used to do their callouts by bicycle. Before that, they walked. It took him 14 months of callouts to be ready to take The Knowledge. You showed up for your test in a big warehouse in Lambeth. You had to listen carefully for your name to be called. It wasn’t called twice.
When your name was called you climbed the stairs and you stood in front of the examiner, who was sitting behind a table. He gave you rapid fire four or five routes: Get me from Picadilly Station to the Tower of London. Get me from Wembley Stadium to Richmond tube. Covent Garden to the Elephant and Castle. If you hesitated, he would say come back in six months.
To talk him through a route, you had to give precise directions. Head off East from the station, first left on Ely Street, past The Red Lion on your right...Bear in mind that unlike most American cities, London is not based on a grid system. It is a maze of small winding streets. The City of London is an area of only 1.1 square miles, but Greater London extends 45 miles from the center.
As I listened raptly, my friend told me how he finally passed The Knowledge. He had been studying List 16 the night before. That’s 1 out of the 164 lists. As he stood quaking before the examiner, he heard him ask for the exact coordinates of List 16, and he rattled off the entire route without hesitation. You’re done, mate, said the examiner, and he handed him the elusive cabbie’s license. He still has it. When he emigrated to the States, he brought his cab with him. He promised to show me his license and badge. The cab he donated a few years ago. Bummed. I really wanted a ride around in it.
Like all cabbies, he was also happy to regale me with a few good stories. One night, he picked up a fare in the East End whose destination was right over the other side of the city. The address just happened to be the next road over from where my friend lived. It was an obscure neighborhood. My friend said nothing, just nodded, and took his customer all the way across the city to his destination. When they arrived, the fare said incredulously I knew you chaps were good, but how did you DO that?!
Afterwards, I was thinking how we all walk around with our own Knowledge nestled in our grey matter. As a nurse, I have memorized thousands of details about the human body: the names of the bones and muscles, symptoms of diseases, side effects of medications. The doctors and pharmacists I work with can rattle off the strength, dosage, frequency, and indications of hundreds of medications.
As we go through life, we build our own unique Knowledge. Sure, as time goes on there’s plenty of forgetting. I like to joke that every time I cram something new into my crowded brain, some old fact falls out to make room. But the truth of it is, our brains seem to have an almost limitless capacity to absorb and retain new information. Every day, I drive off on my own personal Callout, from patient to patient, making my way through the maze of my life street by familiar street. And every day, I learn new landmarks along the way.
As I nurse the dying, I frequently see how the Knowledge can be slowly erased by dementia. Little by little, the lists fade. One day, my 95-year-old patient can no longer recognize her daughter. One day, she forgets her own name.
But on the other end of the spectrum, my daughter fills her brain with calculus, nutritional biology, and how things work as she emerges from childhood into the adult world. She is building her lists.
And I am somewhere in the middle. That memory of the ring in the barm brack was hiding somewhere in my cerebral cortex. Triggered by the Befana cake, it swam to the surface. Maybe next Halloween I’ll bake a barm brack in memory of my mother. Given that it will be me and my teen daughter cutting into it, I might forego the hidden ring.
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