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 she had skipped lunch. That is three somethings. We talked it through at my kitchen table, next to the Sunday pill organiser, and by the time she left she had a plan that was not about giving up the car.
The Route She Has Driven for Years
Here is what I told her, near enough to word for word. The drive you know by heart is the kindest test you have. You are not learning anything new on it, so if it goes wrong, the wrongness is worth noticing. But noticing is not the same as panicking. One missed turn after a night of poor sleep is weather, not climate. What I watch for is the pattern. Did it happen again the next week. Did it happen on a route that has no surprises in it, no construction, no new roundabout. Write it down the day it happens, the way I write names in my notebook, because what is written down is remembered and what is remembered can be compared. A single bad Tuesday tells you almost nothing. Three bad Tuesdays is a conversation.
Six Weeks and One Change
I have a rule I have kept for years, and I lend it out freely. Choose a single tweak to your route, then drive it for a month and a half before deciding if it earns a permanent place. My neighbour wanted to fix everything by Friday. She wanted to stop the new pill, start sleeping better, eat lunch, and stop driving at dusk, all at once. If you change four things and feel better, you will never know which one helped. So she picked the easiest one. Lunch. Actual lunch, at noon, before errands. Six weeks later she came back and said the lost feeling had not returned, not once. I do not claim the sandwich did it. I claim we now know something we did not know, and it cost her nothing but a habit. If the slips had continued, the next change would have been the brown bag, every bottle and box, carried to the pharmacist at the grocery store where they still know me.
Why memory slips after sixtyIf names keep slipping, the video explains what is usually going on.
The Notebook in the Glove Box
This is where I sound like myself, so bear with me. Keep a small notebook in the glove box, and a pencil, because in my experience pens freeze and pencils don’t. When a drive goes oddly, pull over somewhere safe and write three lines. Where you were going. What happened. What was different that day, even if the answer is nothing. That little habit is the same idea as the notebook as an external memory, just parked in the car. Paper does not judge you. It just keeps the record straight when your feelings want to round the story up or down. After a couple of months you can lay the pages out and see the shape of it. Ordinary forgetting has a shape, and so does the other kind, and they do not look alike on paper.
What Went Wrong for Marla
I will tell you about a woman from the senior centre on Elm Street, because it is the part of this I carry. Marla drove the same four miles to us every Thursday for years. Then she started arriving flustered, saying the road looked strange. She did not write anything down, because writing it down made it real, she said. Her daughter took the keys in October, all at once, the way you pull off a bandage. What it cost was more than the car. Marla stopped coming on Thursdays, because the daughter worked and the ride never quite got arranged, and by spring she had shrunk out of her old life. I still think about whether a notebook and a slower hand could have bought her a gentler year. Maybe not. But a record would have told the family something better than a feeling, and it would have given Dr. Okafor something to look at besides worry. When I finally sat with the daughter, the exchange was short. She said, I just want her safe. I said, I know. Safe and still living are not always the same errand.
The Rain that Was Not There
I have been reading a strange enormous novel Walt left on the table, all about one single rainy day in Los Angeles, and the odd thing is that the real Los Angeles that day was cloudless. The whole city in the book is soaked, and every character keeps moving through their usual streets in weather that was never there. I cannot stop thinking about that as a picture of a mind on a bad day. Familiar roads, familiar turns, and a rain only you can see. That is why the record matters. The notebook does not argue about the weather. It just notes the route, and whether you got home, and how it felt, and after a while the pages tell you whether the rain is lifting or settling in. My mother used to keep a diary of her drives to my father’s appointments, and after she was gone we found it, and it was the calmest account of a hard year I have ever read.
So if you are where my neighbour was, here is the order I would use. Start the glove-box notebook today, before you change a single habit, because you want a baseline and not a guess. Then pick one change, the smallest one, and give it six weeks. And before you rearrange the pills or the lunch or the driving hours, go watch the video first, so you know what is usually behind these slips and what actually helps, then make your one change with your eyes open. If the pages start showing a pattern you do not like, that is when you take the notebook and the brown bag to the pharmacist, and then to your own doctor, in that order if you can manage it.
Walt read the novel over my shoulder and said the rain was the most believable part. He also said the pencil in our glove box has been there since 2019. Some things keep better than you expect.