The New York Times reported the other day on the frenzied efforts among Boomers to sharpen their minds — particularly the parts of their minds involving memory.
When David Bunnell, a magazine publisher who lives in Berkeley, Calif., went to a FedEx store to send a package a few years ago, he suddenly drew a blank as he was filling out the forms.
“I couldn’t remember my address,” said Mr. Bunnell, 60, with a measure of horror in his voice. “I knew where I lived, and I knew how to get there, but I didn’t know what the address was.”
Mr. Bunnell is among tens of millions of baby boomers who are encountering the signs, by turns amusing and disconcerting, that accompany the decline of the brain’s acuity: a good friend’s name suddenly vanishing from memory; a frantic search for eyeglasses only to find them atop the head; milk taken from the refrigerator then put away in a cupboard.
Yeah, feeling like you’re losing brain cells with each passing year isn’t fun, although (as the article mentions later on) it’s not really as bad as most people seem to think it is. But something needs to be noted about the uselessness of boomers’ declining memory: it’s not all our fault.
“It’s not our fault.” If that’s not a pure expression of rationalization, boomer-style, I don’t know what could be better. But in this case, consider: the world flat-out refuses to stand still anymore. No wonder our memory scares us; the schoolyards and playgrounds and entire neighborhoods of childhood are (in far too many cases) just gone.
At the top of this post is a screen capture (from Google Maps) of an aerial view of the block in my hometown formerly occupied by the Hickory Street School (elementary grades only). A larger view (turned at the proper angle, so north is truly “up”) is also available here at the site.
The school itself, built in 1902, was torn down in 1984. It looked quite a bit like the school from “A Christmas Story,” which is shown here:
If this were really Hickory Street School, the photographer would have been standing, roughly, at the corner of Hickory and Walnut Streets.
(As you will see if you read the How It Was “Autumn” booklet, the real thing had these huge ugly black-painted fire escapes affixed to the wall to the right in the above picture.)
In the Google Maps aerial above, the school would have been where the ballfield is now, at the bottom right; a ballfield was at the diagonally opposite corner (top left); and at the top right — where the basketball court is now — was a sort of multipurpose, well, recess yard I guess you could call it. That was where we played kickball, and they eventually erected the standard playground equipment (monkey bars, kid-propelled merry-go-round, etc.) in that general area, too.
The bottom left? Sigh. That was just an empty lot, grassy in warm months and snowy (or just frozen solid) in colder ones, site of long-gone (I guess) games like “Red Rover, Red Rover” and “1-2-3 Red Light” (a/k/a “Statue”).
See? Not our fault. Where did we put all that stuff from 30, 40, 50 years ago???
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