Red Skirt remembers
Posted by Anne Leary on Apr 15th, 2008
I'm already worried about losing my memory. My now young adult children tease me that it's one of the first signs of old age. I prefer to think I am focusing my mind on the more important things in life (like my next blog post) when I drive to my daughter's high school (even though she graduated last year, the youngest of three) instead of where I really need to go that morning. My mom used to do the same thing and we used to tease her--she said, in the words of another era, that it was like an old horse trodding a well-worn path--only there were seven of us, so she had more excuse.
My mom's been gone for a while, but my dad's still doing pretty well at 85. I took him to an exercise class on my last visit. I suppose I could have gone in there for the geriatric slo-mo cardio, but instead I read by a sunny window. That first rushed morning I forgot to bring anything to read, so I picked up the only thing--you guessed it, an AARP magazine. Since I hit a half-century I've been on their prospective members' list but toss their mailers in the trash--you know they're mostly Dems--but this time I was stuck. I will admit one of the articles struck home--how to handle your 90 something parent who is still telling you what to do when you're in your seventies. I had to laugh because my dad was giving me some driving advice on the way over. At this point I will admit that I taught all my kids to drive and it was as traumatic for me as it was for them. I do not like to relinquish the wheel. At 85 they will have to pry it out of my arthritic, near dead hands. The AARP columnist shared sage thoughts on appreciating that you still have a parent.
What prompted this post was David Brooks' column, "The Great Forgetting". It starts out this way:
They say the 21st century is going to be the Asian Century, but, of course, it's going to be the Bad Memory Century. Already, you go to dinner parties and the middle-aged high achievers talk more about how bad their memories are than about real estate. Already, the information acceleration syndrome means that more data is coursing through everybody's brains, but less of it actually sticks.
(Though Brooks is not quite old enough to be a Boomer, this does sound like a typically Boomer-centric view-- that the Earth revolves around our Sun.) But maybe I should start writing my memoirs (as my driving around may have great geopolitical import) while I still have a memory, but in the meantime I'll keep blogging in hopes that it'll exercise my mind. And I'll have a record of at least some of what I was thinking about yesterday.
Comments
No one has commented on this story yet. Perhaps you'd like to be the first?
Post a comment
Commenting requires registration.