Senior Moments

My husband was reading an article about early warning signs of dementia. He asked me one of the test questions. “If you wrote three things on a paper, would you remember what they were in half an hour?”

“I would remember what I wrote, but I would have no idea where I put the paper.”

Momentary amnesia has plagued me my entire life. When I worked, I hooked my keys to my belt with an elastic stretch loop before I exited my car. This stopped me from locking the keys in my car as well prevented me from having to spend half the day looking for them. I didn’t remove the key ring from my belt until I was inside my home. Then I hooked it to the strap of my handbag.

The first time I had my lifelong habit of momentary amnesia linked to age was the year I turned the big five-o. I had walked to the rear of my classroom and stood staring at my file cabinets. I wouldn’t have given my mental blackout a second thought if I didn’t overhear one of my students say, “She’s like my grandma. She forgot what she went to get.”

Panic set in. Did my constant forgetting have more significance than I was ready to admit?

That night my husband reassured me that I was not suddenly “losing it.” “There hasn’t been a day since we met that you don’t stop in the middle of a sentence because you forget what you’re talking about.”

At the time, I concluded my brain froze now and then because it was in constant overload and needed a short rest. However, now that I’m collecting Social Security, the momentary amnesia I’ve had my entire life takes on a new meaning. Many others dread dementia or Alzheimer’s or else there wouldn’t be so many tests and articles in magazines and newspapers about the topic. In fact, a few days after my husband’s question, there was an article in the paper about the medical reasons for “Senior Moments.” It seems my brain started shrinking around the time the rest of my body started stretching – somewhere in my fifties.

I put down the article and came to a serious decision: as long as I can remember the three things I would write on the paper, I would not panic because I don’t remember where I put it. A lifetime of experience has taught me it will turn up eventually - probably in the lint filter of my clothes dryer. When I get to the point that I can’t find the dryer, I will begin to worry.