boomers

God, do I love moments of unintended poetry.

God, do I hate the ravages of age which, within minutes, can scatter those moments to the far edges of memory. Then you have to mount a whole frigging safari to recover them…

The Missus and I were on the way home from work yesterday. (We don’t work at the same place, but we do carpool. Which gives us a chance to talk, to share moments of drama and outrage from the past eight hours, to be present when the other bursts into song or, yes, poetry.)

Her boss and his wife are doing us a favor which, if they can manage it, will be done ideally sometime the next 24 hours. I hadn’t heard if it was still “on,” though, so I asked TM if she knew what the status was Actually, she said, actually, no I haven’t. She had me punch her office’s phone number into her cell phone (she was driving) so she could briefly remind her boss about it. It took 10 seconds, if that.

But the end of the conversation cracked me up. Her half of it went something like, “Uh-huh… Okay. Thanks. Just remind me in the morning, in case I forget to ask.” And then she hung up.

She saw me laughing. “What?”

“Oh, you know. Suddenly I just thought of a saying.” Which was:

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Aerial view (GMaps) of former Hickory St. School area 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.

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Like a Candle in the Wind

Boomer Memory