Forgetting

The kitchen table at the senior centre on Elm Street has a wobble in one leg, and last March a woman named Ruth set her brown paper bag on it like she was setting down something heavy. Her daughter stood behind her chair. Ruth said her husband had told the same story three times at…

Poor sleep looks exactly like a failing memory, and it is far easier to fix. I learned that at the pharmacy counter long before I learned it from a book. A man would come in worried sick because he could not hold onto a name, and somewhere in the conversation it would come out that…

She set the bottle on my kitchen table like it was evidence. A little round thing from the drugstore shelf, multivitamin printed on the front. Ruth is seventy-one and she had driven across town because she could not remember her neighbour’s name at the mailbox, and the neighbour has lived beside her for nine years.…

Yes, and it does it quietly. That is the blunt version. There is no headache that says pay attention, no warning light. At the pharmacy counter I learned to treat the blood-pressure numbers the way I treated a leaky faucet at home: the drip does not look like much, but look under the sink a…

A few Tuesdays back I drove to the senior centre on Elm Street and could not, for the life of me, remember the word “lanyard.” I stood in the parking lot holding mine, that green cord on a clip, and called it “the neck string” to the volunteer at the desk. She did not blink.…

Marlene brought me her appointment book instead of her brown bag last Tuesday. She had written her own name in it three times on the same page, in three different spellings. She set it down on the table at the senior centre on Elm Street and asked me straight out whether this was the kind…

On a Tuesday morning in March I was at the long table in the back room of the senior centre on Elm Street, unpacking my canvas bag. A man named Howard sat across from me with a brown paper bag of his own, folded flat, empty. He had not brought his medicines. He had brought…

A good way to remember a name is to write it down before the evening is over. Why memory slips after sixtyWatch the video: the cause, and what you can do about it. The name that leaves by morning I have said “I’ll remember that” about a name more times than I can count, and…

The woman at the senior centre on Elm Street had her grandson’s laptop open on the folding table, and she was crying at a spreadsheet. Not about money. About memory. She had typed the same name into a cell four times because each time she finished, she could not remember whether she had already done…

Most people believe that a forgotten name is the first sign of a failing mind. It is not. It is a filing problem, not a fire. I spent thirty-two years in the basement pharmacy of a county hospital, and now I spend my Tuesdays at the senior centre on Elm Street sorting pill bottles. I…