Remember being in fifth grade? Imagine yourself at a birthday party, sitting in a circle with your buds and playing a rousing game of Telephone. One kid whispers a message to the kid beside him, and she passes it to the next kid—all the way around the circle. By the time it gets back to the origin, the message is bent and bloated—except for the last word. The last word in the message is the one everyone can remember. Once when I was in second grade, my dad sent me to the party store [he called it the beer store] to get three things. He warned me not to forget. All the way there, I dutifully recited: “bread, butter, Lucky Strikes; bread and butter and Lucky Strikes.” It had rhythm. “Bread and butter and Lucky Strikes.” When I returned, the triumphant seven-year-old shopper, I delivered bread and butter and Lucky Strikes. We’ll skip dad’s over-colorful dialog and make do with some narrative summary. At an impressive volume, he reminded me that he’d sent me for bread and a newspaper and Lucky Strikes (which doesn’t have nearly as pleasant a cadence). I remembered the Lucky Strikes, and I remembered bread. And what goes with bread—butter, of course. The point of this thrilling East Detroit drama is that we human beings tend to best remember the last word in the sentence, in the paragraph, in the scene
