I just tried to send my wife an e-mail, telling her I had bought
dinner for us from a restaurant. It took a solid two minutes for me
to remember the word for what I had ordered her: bruschetta.
This has been happening to me more and more frequently. Until
yesterday, I took it with some equanimity. Okay, so I could never
seem to remember — what’s the stuff that’s the essence of yoghurt?
Acidophilus. Okay. But yesterday, I called in a takeout order to a
restaurant, and the girl on the phone asked me for my phone number,
and I started to recite it — and could not remember the last four
digits.
“Okay, use this one,” I said, and started to recite my cell
phone number — and I forgot the last four digits of that one,
too.
Gone. Just plain gone. I just printed out some information I
needed for a short trip, and hurriedly scribbled my phone numbers
down on it while I could bring them to mind. They came back. All
these things come back.
At least temporarily.
A COUPLE OF DAYS AGO, I WENT SHOPPING. I had run out of one of
those ingredients you keep in the refrigerator forever, it seems,
like you’ll never run out of it. Use it in pasta puttanesca, for
example. The little green things, just a bit bigger than
beebees.
Lucky I knew where the grocery store kept these things, in the
display aisle with pickles and condiments. Capers, that was it. I
couldn’t bring the word to the fore till I actually saw the
bottle.
In an all-too-common variant on this forgetting process, I kept
grasping for the word and getting another one that I knew was
wrong: shallots.
Maybe pressure brings on this difficulty, kind of like the way
you end up hitting an awful golf shot just because you have to hit
it over a water hazard. I got on the phone with a restaurant again
the other day, so we’d have an easy meal at home after my wife and
younger son had been away on a day trip. And I panicked, worried I
wouldn’t be able to remember the name of the dish I wanted to eat,
and would be forced to babble at the girl on the phone about pasta
triangles with chopped tomato sauce on them, and so forth.
Lobster ravioli. Got it. But it was a close call.
MAYBE THIS HAPPENS TO EVERYBODY. Maybe I’m just fraying at the
edges. I have always had an extraordinary memory. When I used to
write books, I could envision a passage from any portion of the
book in progress, and then simply recite the book from that point.
If I make note of a quote from a book I’m reading, I can remember
what portion of what page — right or left — it’s found on, and
approximately where in the book I need to open to find it.
That doesn’t even take account of the hundreds of songs —
words, chords, and melodies — I’ve memorized without even
trying.
And, for some reason, I remember sequences of numbers. On a
vacation once, I changed clothes and drove ten miles to a golf
course, and, when I got there, found I had left my wallet in my
other trousers. I could, however, remember my credit card number,
so I didn’t have to go back and get the wallet.
But something has changed. I find myself in a room, and I don’t
remember why I went there, and I fumble for something in the brain.
And I stand there stupefied. Not for long. I cover it up.
So long as you don’t notice the blank look in my eyes.
Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover,
Massachusetts.
