It’s never really that bad, when you think about it…
I have this bad habit of not connecting anything I do (or eat) to my physical condition a few hours later.
Mary and I took a little vacation break, a few months ago, and I was feeling bloated and sluggish in the early afternoon.
“I mean, I really, really feel catatonic, wiped-out tired.”
“Jim?”
“Yes?”
“You ate really heavily breaded fish and chips and you drank three mimosas.”
“That’s right. I did. Didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did.”
Or, there are times when short term memory goes AWOL, in favor of borrowing the latest epidemic:
“Oh. My. Word. I think I’m going to be sick. I must have that flu.”
“You can’t eat a quart of cherry tomatoes, Jim.”
“Was it a quart?”
“Look at the label.”
“It is a quart. How did I eat a quart?”
“I don’t know. But you did.”
Sometimes I step into full hypochondriac mode:
“I am really tired. Do you think something is wrong with me? Diabetes?”
“Jim.”
“What?”
“You binge watched ‘Bloodline’ and then you got up and watched YouTube at 3 AM.”
“I did. You’re right.”
“Yes, you did.”
It runs in my family. My brother had cardio worries once:
“I think I’m having a back heart attack. They say you can feel in your back first.’
“Scott — you haven’t chopped wood in a year, and you were at it for five hours.”
“I was. That’s right.”
“You pulled a muscle in your back.”
Maybe the lofty interpretation is that we’re worried about big things and that short term memory just isn’t very high on our priorities. When someone asks me what I’ve been doing today, I’m reasonably certain I must have done something useful, or my life would fall apart, but I really can’t give you the minute by minute accounting that some people can provide almost like they were printing a receipt or something:
“Well I was at the grocery store and I thought I’d try a different white wine, so I was debating the difference between Pinot Grigio and Pino Gris. Is there a difference? Well, so then, I went over to produce, and there was this really sad man in a scooter just transfixed by the paper towels, and I could tell this one lady was giving me a weird look for my wine purchase, and then I saw someone I really didn’t want to talk to and I pretended to be really interested in this salmon steak and then I..”
My wife can provide these instant core dumps of the whole day. I’ve listened to her on the phone with friends recounting a detailed itinerary of the past five or six days with absolute precision. I think this is one of the reasons she can tell me where the flashlights are and where I’ve left my running shoes–not so much because she has great spatial sense, but because she remembers what everyone did that day, and when they did it, and what they left behind them after they did it.
“Pretty sure I must have left that new blazer in a restaurant or something. The one I really like.”
“No, you hung it up. It’s in the closet.”
“I did? It is?”
“Yes. I was surprised to see you actually putting something away.”
“I shouldn’t do that. You lose things that way.”
