Memory tools
An overview of simple daily tools for names, keys, routes, the calendar, the notebook, phones, and fixed places for things.
-
Phone reminders without frustration
Tuesday morning, quarter past eight. My husband is hunting for his reading glasses while his coffee goes cold. His phone is on the counter, face down, doing the little buzz dance every few minutes. “That thing wants you more than I do,” I tell him. He finds the glasses on top of his own head.…
-
Route notes for familiar drives
A neighbour asked me last week whether she should stop driving because she got lost on the way to the grocery store she has used for thirty years. I asked her what had been different that day. She said nothing, and then she said the pharmacy had changed her water pill, and then she said…
-
A landing zone for keys and glasses
Marlene stood in my kitchen last Tuesday holding her reading glasses in her right hand and patting every pocket she had with her left. She was looking for her glasses. I waited until she caught my eye in the window over the sink, and then we both laughed, because what else can you do. She…
-
Setting up a phone for older hands
A man from the walking group stopped me by the door on Tuesday. He held out his phone like it had bitten him. His grandson had “fixed” it over the weekend, and now the letters were small again and something kept talking to him from the top of the screen. He said, I just want…
-
A calendar routine that works
Many people believe that remembering everything depends on holding it all in your head. After 32 years behind a pharmacy counter and four years running brown-bag reviews at the senior centre on Elm Street, I know that is wrong. The people who stay on top of things write them down. A simple calendar routine does…
-
A place for everything
The basement pharmacy had a smell I can still call up — cold stone and paper and something faintly sweet from the syrup bottles. It was 1976, my second year at the county hospital, and I had lost the narcotics ledger. Not lost exactly. Set down somewhere between the storeroom and the counter, in a…
-
Remembering names with a simple system
The church basement smelled like coffee and lemon furniture polish, the way it always does on the first Tuesday of the month, and I was standing there with a styrofoam cup going cold in my hand because a woman named — and here it comes — a woman I have known for four years walked…
-
The notebook as an external memory
Margaret held the little spiral pad up like it was evidence in a trial. It was the size of a playing card, bent at the corners, and the elastic band had gone grey. “This thing runs my life,” she said, and then she laughed, because she had come to the senior centre on Elm Street…
-
Everyday memory tools after sixty
I have a confession to start, because I believe in beginning honest. Last March I stood in my own kitchen with the blood-pressure cuff in my hand and could not remember where the hall drawer was. My own hall. My own drawer. I had put the cuff away in that drawer for four years. Walt…