Article: As memory serves, which it...

As memory serves, which it doesn't too well, I began to research Where Did I Leave My Glasses? because I could never find where I had left my glasses. Also, I kept hearing myself asking, "What was I just going to say?" and "Why did I come into the kitchen?" and (most often of all) "What's his (her, its) name? It's on the tip of my tongue."

All of which was annoying but not deeply alarming, because the same thing seemed to be happening to everyone, many of my colleagues and most of my friends. It was our communal complaint, and we all agreed that we couldn't all be losing it, so we kept laughing at ourselves and our peek-a-boo memory, and making guarded jokes about Alzheimer's.

Somewhere along that wavering line I suggested to my husband that we write a frivolous little book about this peek-a-boo business, a skinny stocking stuffer of a book that we could put together quickly. It would be a compilation of Ten Most lists: Ten Most Common Memory Complaints, Ten Best (or Worst) Memory Jokes, etc.

The project was begun and faltered. It faltered because, although the memory jokes amused me, the state of my own memory was amusing me less and less.

This was especially so at my desk, where as a non-fiction writer I must take a mass of research material and organize it in a fluid way, moving with logic and hopefully a bit of grace from points A to B to C. Well, organization is not my long suit, and for me this has always been the hardest part of the job. Now it was getting harder. I would be working on an article, and the perfect way to segue from point A to B would flash suddenly in my mind like a thousand-watt bulb—and, in the next instant, out, gone, and goodbye.

When I got anxious enough, I took myself to a neurologist, who put me through a series of tests and cordially assured me that from early middle age on, my kind of memory loss is perfectly normal. But people generally do not know that it is normal, so they come to him in worried droves. "Stop worrying, you're fine," he said.

I floated home. Then I thought, This is remarkable. Here is a condition that, as the man said, is normal, and not only normal but universal, yet I haven't known it and my friends haven't known it and doubtless a great many other people don't know it, and all we do, all of us, is worry about it. And that was when the quickie little stocking stuffer got shelved.

I began interviewing memory specialists, who informed me that memory loss is the single greatest health concern of the baby-boomer generation. And I learned a good deal else that I hadn't known before. Such as:
Why people's names are typically the first to go. And the differences between male memory and female memory. And the upside—a crucial one—of normal memory loss. And how we can tell when it isn't normal. And why our memories deceive us. And the strengths and weaknesses of brain memory compared to computer memory. And memory in relation to diet, and to exercise, and why we remember emotional pain better than physical pain, and why we may be biologically wired to forget, and what the future holds (you can't imagine) for the chemical and surgical enhancement of our memories...

And two years later, I finished the book that puts it all together and hopefully will inform, entertain and reassure readers who may not know, just as I did not know, that our kind of memory loss is, hallelujah, normal.

Copyright © 2008 by Martha Weinman Lear