REMEMBER ME?

 

When you get to a certain age your body begins to entertain a race between your brain and your skin.  The object of the race is to see which one will lose its memory first.  I reached that age five years ago and the race has so-far remained pretty even, although my mind is now showing signs of wanting to spit the bit and my skin is definitely on the back stretch. 

It’s disturbing when you look down on a sunny day and see someone else’s arms hanging from your sleeves.  When you were younger you fussed about a contusion or a new scar.  Now the scars are the only reliable landmarks on my limbs.  Everything else is constantly changing.  I go to bed with a lifelong freckle on my shoulder and wake up the next morning with a sepia tattoo the size of a doormat.  I twist my wrist to look at my watch and my forearm suddenly imitates the belly of a man who has recently lost 175 pounds, bending to tie his shoe.  It’s disheartening.

And the mind doesn’t fare any better. 

Two days ago I was at a department store admiring a two seater sling swing.  This is a contraption designed to parrot a vintage porch glider but can thrive on a lawn or an open patio because of its integrated surrey roof.  I was slowly rocking, gently imbibing idle thoughts, when a passing woman abruptly stopped and turned.

“Randy!”

Being called by name at high volume in a public place is naturally hostile to idle thoughts and I glanced up at the source of the outcry.  A woman old enough to have children with Ph.D.’s was staring at me with a face annotated by age and recognition.  This is the moment one’s mental Rolodex is supposed to appear before the inner eye and scroll to an appropriate match.  But all I saw was a blizzard of blank index cards.  It was as if the place where my mental archivist kept his files had been bulldozed to the bone.  I was getting nothing.

“Oh, hi!” I responded.  Most current dictionaries now list the word ‘OhHi!’ as an expletive and offer the following meaning: usually uttered by a person in a state of befuddled remorse when he or she must respond to a greeting from a friend or acquaintance.

The habitual sufferer of fugues and micro-amnesias, in a situation like mine, does exactly what I did, --try to hide their pagan ignorance behind a blank expression.  A blank expression is not to be confused with an innocent expression, which strives for a beatific look of inexperience and purity.  A blank expression is more like the sole of a hiking boot worn smooth by wanderlust. 

As I looked at the woman and, inwardly, at the unsympathetic Rolodex,  I could sense she was searching my face for the light of recognition, always useful for reaffirming one’s place in the cosmos.  She had no idea that in my case, wires to that particular light had been shorting out for years. 

“How did everything work out?” she asked me.

“Everything went just fine,” I assured her, concerned my floating settee might suddenly collapse under the added burden of my hypocrisy. 

“That’s great.”  If awkwardness were sheep, this poor woman had by now struggled into three wool sweaters. 

“Great to see you again,” I told her, simply because something had to be said.   She nodded and mercifully walked toward Garden Supplies, where she presumably had a more satisfying interaction with a tulip bulb.

Names elude me.  They have ever since I realized humanity was an evolutionary dead end, just another of the hundreds of millions of species that have and will become folded into the history and prehistory of this planet.  I am somewhat better with faces because I believe facial recognition uses an older part of the brain, a part that subscribes to the usefulness of remembering landmarks and enduring tonal qualities.  But this woman’s face didn’t ring any bells.  Her hair hung like damp Buffalograss and she had a large phalanx of melanocytes bivouacked on her right cheek.  You would think a square facial mole would be a helpful mnemonic, but no.  The mental Rolodex was an empty crypt. 

Typoglycemia is a new word that relates to the innate ability to reconstruct printed words from scrambled letters.  Time has a bad habit of scrambling facial features, -enlarging the nose, drooping the eyes, sinking the cheeks, pursing the lips, yellowing the teeth, puttying the skin and a hundred other dreary entertainments.  You would think a kind of typoglycemia might come to the rescue of someone unable to place a face so typically juggled by the traffic of calendars.  But no luck.  The aptitude to reassemble a time-worn countenance into the nursery of a high school graduation photograph has sadly eluded me. 

Aging is an accelerating process of stepping over thresholds.  More accurately, it is losing one’s ability to maintain a tight hold on one’s threshes. 

My sister just had a birthday party.  At some point, birthday cakes become one of those thresholds we step across.  It happens the instant a single large candle symbolically represents a handful of smaller ones.  No doubt this is a practical solution to a problem that has bedeviled Hong Kong for so long.  It also avoids unnecessary fire hazards (fifty campfires surrounded by a dozen haycocks of wrapping paper is a portrait of a misspent insurance deductible) and can save air conditioning expenses.  But still, it is one of those subtle indicators one is approaching the Halloween stage of life. 

It’s a strange thing about fading mental faculties, -the mind remembers its earlier ability to recall what has now gone missing.  I think the first cosmic mercy of aging should be a complete ignorance of having once possessed the memory one is now groping to recover.  The second mercy?  No one’s face should change with time.  Barring that, everyone should wear name tags with printing large enough to read from a fake glider to the nearest department store aisle.

Written by Randy Kerr (JWR Kerr). Read more about the author at Google+ or Amazon.