December 24, 2014 Article

Old Coots have highly functioning short-term memories!

By Merlin Lessler

Old coots and young children have a lot in common: their interaction with society is erratic, they are self focused, have no patience, can be embarrassing to be with, cause public disturbances, wake up a lot in the middle of the night, won’t share their toys and go around with nametags sewn into their clothes. We have the nametags for the same reason as the kids; we leave out stuff all over the place. All sorts of stuff. Drop in any place old coots gather, and you’ll find it littered with the things we’ve left behind: baseball caps (with Mickey Mantle’s signature embroidered across the brim), NY Giant Super Bowl XXV sweat shirts (with Phil Simms number on the back), eye glasses (with lenses the size of saucers), seven day pill dispensers (with 42 compartments), the New York Daily News (opened to a completed crossword puzzle with six misspelled words). The clothing items have a nametag inside; the rest of the stuff is engraved with our phone number. But, we never get anything back. It goes to the museum.    

Of course those ID’s wouldn’t help us find the glasses we’ve frantically searched for, with them resting on the top of our head. Something we don’t notice until we catch a glimpse in the hall mirror. Or, the car keys we carry around in our hand as we scour the house looking for them. Even though we’ve frantically switched them from one hand to the other while checking our pockets. A half dozen times!

But, contrary to popular opinion, the problem isn’t due to a defective short-term memory.  Just the opposite. Our short-term memories work too well; they immediately overwrite all previously stored information. Take the typical old coot situation; we walk into the kitchen to get something and stop dead in our tracks and mumble, “Why did I come in here?” It seems like a short-term memory problem to the uneducated, but it isn’t. On our journey to the kitchen we stopped to pick a wad of cat hair off the floor, walked over to the bathroom to throw it in the waste basket, unscrewed the filter on the sink faucet and cleaned the screen, peeked out the window to check the bird feeder and then went to the kitchen. All those new memories override the one that sent us there in the first place.

We don’t deserve to be chastised for a short-term memory deficiency. Just the opposite; we should be praised for having a fantastic, short-term memory. I’d finish this thought with a clever ending, but I just looked out the window and saw a squirrel run up the tree with a black walnut in his mouth and lost my train of thought. Oh yes, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!