April 18, 2018 Article

The Old Coot finds his pen.

By Merlin Lesler

I’m well acquainted with it – been dealing with it for decades. It start’s in your fifties, for most people. I call it memory distractions. Sounds harmless. Memory collapse is more like it! I first stumbled into it in my mid-forties. I was on the phone with a vendor; after settling on a delivery date, he asked for my address. My mind went blank. I knew the street name, but the house number escaped me. I said to him, “Hang on a second; someone’s at the door.” I put the phone down and tore to the front door, went out on the porch to see what numbers were nailed to the siding and reported back. A few days later, I was on the phone telling Cheryl, a family friend for years, about my memory collapse. She laughed so hard she had to put her phone down. When she came back on the line, she said, “That’s nothing! I was on the phone and was asked my name; I went blank. I had to hang up and call back a minute later. With a – “We got disconnected” – excuse.

Her experience made me feel so much better. I knew I wasn’t alone, memory spasms were ordinary. And, to make it even better, hers’ was worse. I forgot all about my address failure, but a few years later, when I was in my fifties, the memory lapses become a way of life. The issue really came to the forefront the other day, I was racing around the room looking for a pen that I swore I’d just put down on the table. I eventually went to the “pens and gum” drawer (a name it was given back when we had little kids running around the house), got another pen and sat down at the table to write. It was then that I discovered the first pen; I was holding it in my teeth.

What a shock! Worse than a typical old coot memory lapse, the one where you “lose” your glasses and discover them riding on top of your head, or the one where you find the “lost” car keys, after racing around in a panic, tightly clasped in your hand. Whenever something like this happens, you think, “Alzheimer’s. Now I’ve got it!” But, after a short while, you forget the incident, and all is well. It’s not Alzheimer’s. It’s just a rerun of your teenage years. Those days where you: “Forgot to do your homework.” – “Forgot to make your bed,” – “Forgot to put your dishes in the sink.” Talk about memory problems, compared to teens, us oldsters are memory savants. Sure, we have these episodes of memory “distraction.” That’s our problem; we get distracted; we have too many thoughts going through our head at the same time. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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