Forgetting

Getting older and getting more forgetful go hand in hand. I do not intend to beat myself up over this fact. I know my brain is functioning: I didn’t vote for Trump and I manage a house, a job and a herd of cats.

But not remembering small things can be annoying. If you also experience these little memory glitches, such as the name of that book you just read, here is some consolation.

Michael Perry, Wisconsin’s own chicken-raising author, has written a new book, Montaigne in Barn Boots-An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy.  In it, he addresses the “treachery of memory”. Here is an excerpt:

In the category of driving off with things on my car roof, I count one wallet (circled back and found it in the Culver’s drive-through; celebrated my good fortune with a second order of curds), one iPhone (heard it thump the luggage rack, then watched in the rear view mirror as it pinwheeled down the highway), and an infinity of coffees of which I placed on the roof “just for a second” only to forget it in two.”

How wonderful! The coffee sailing off the car roof, the room we enter and promptly forget what we went there to get, the packed suitcase that got left behind…….we are not alone in being sidewacked by these memory tricks.

I was personally comforted by this passage….. “recently I wrote 482 words of a column eulogizing my old manual typewriter before nagging deja vu drove me to scroll up and down to discover I had already written that exact column three weeks previously”.

This is the 595th consecutive weekly blog I have written. Since I don’t want to bore you, dear reader, by repeating subject matter, I find myself frequently checking my own archives. Perhaps I can occasionally out-trick the memory trickster.

And here is one final thought on this topic. Younger people have these temporary memory lapses as well. A younger family member of ours once set her filled cup of take out coffee on her driver’s seat just for a second. You know what happened.

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