HIM: I think I’m beginning to acknowledge the fact that I’m getting older. Now mind you, I still think young, but there are reminders out there that no matter how I think, old age is creeping in. There are times I head out of the office and drive up the hill heading North. Halfway up I start wondering where is it I’m heading? I figure that if I just keep driving I’ll spot something that will trigger my memory; most of the time it works and it’s either Sovereign Bank or Stop & Shop that is my destination.
Now, I can’t tell you how many times I can’t find my car in the S & S parking lot. I just become just another person going up and down the rows with my shopping cart in tow. I become convinced that the car has been stolen, when, there it is, parked nowhere near where I swear I put it.

I really do need to get my automatic door lock fixed so I could just keep it pressed until I hear my car beeping. What I do now is park next to a carriage drop, at least my choices are limited.

It’s no different at work. I can get up from the computer, wander into the next room and then stand there wondering what I came for. Nancy says I have selective recall. She accuses me of remembering every salient fact of a good news story but faltering on our anniversary date.

She furthers her point by saying I can remember the name of a Board of Health member who served only two years 25 years ago and then moved to Texas, but is off by a year on our daughter Susannah’s birthday. By the way, that would be Alan Gnospelius (I can even spell it correctly). If you give me 10 minutes I’ve got Sue’s birthday written here someplace…but where? Nancy bought me a beautiful a 2008 Desk Calendar back in December…I think it’s cumbersome. First off, I forget to write in the entries. If I do, I forget to go and check my appointments each day. When I do remember to check it out I can’t find the damn thing. I have messages written down on every piece of scratch paper on my desk. It can take me a half hour to sift through all that paperwork…I can see the message in my mind, when I find it, it’s never how I pictured it. Sometimes I mistake the note for rubbish and head for the trash containers to try and retrieve it.

The comforting thing is that when I remember to talk about what I forget, I learn that everybody else seems to have the same problem; many of them are much younger then myself. Take a politician…they all have trouble remembering what they said a week ago.

If it were a year ago…forget it. I think maybe forgetting began with politicians. Nobody says, “Hillary must have forgotten what she said last week.” They just say, “What do you expect, she’s a politician.” So I’m in interesting company.

Oh, I almost forgot the point of what I’m trying to say here… I’m angry at her. She really aggravated me yesterday and I’m giving her the cold shoulder. I know she’ll want to know why, and that’s the problem. I know there is something that annoyed me but I can’t remember what it is.

How do I get away with, “I can’t talk about this right now” or “You don’t know?” or, “I can’t believe you have to ask!” The last thing I want to do is sit down with her and have her help me figure out what she did that ticked me off, that hardly seems appropriate. My strategy on these occasions is to simply tell her that I don’t wish to rehash something that’s already 24 hours old and that being the forgiving person that I am; it would make no sense to belabor the issue.

She’s a few years younger than I but I can tell you this…women never forget what they’re angry about. She can go back decades and remind me how I forgot her 40th birthday or even last week when I forgot that her Loreal Preference hair dye color is “Dark Ash Brown, not Golden Auburn.” In that sense, men are more at peace than women because we don’t have to muddle our minds remembering all that trivia. I’ve done it; I can look at the positive side of forgetfulness. I’d love to be a fly on the wall when I forward this to her…if I can remember her e-mail address.

HER: The mind is like a computer. You input information for nearly 70 years, and the thing starts to slow down. It’s time for him to send some useless information to the recycle bin. For example, anything that Mauro Mazzilli has said for the last 30 years can go. All references to his childhood pet, Freddie the chicken, his sister’s grades being better than his, and anything I said during bouts of extreme PMS should be gone. He can delete all the selectmen’s meetings from the early eighties, and every single meeting of the Wage and Personnel Board since its inception. How can you remember anything current when you’re still trying to recall who it was who made a motion to cap the landfill at the town meeting of 1976.

Dan has tinkered with his mind/computer, however, by blocking the entries of certain things. Words like shopping, yard work, painting, fixing, spending, holidays, and birthdays are blocked from entry. Other words, like politics, food, reality television, and stupid movies are welcomed in. These things clutter up his system of recall.
He’s also a little deaf, but if you whisper something in the next room or you say a politician’s name under your breath, he’s all ears. He has decided exactly what he wants to remember and hear. He thinks because the numbers indicate advancing age, that he should match his behavior to the calendar, but he is being disingenuous.
He can work 16 hours a day and get a little tired. He has the digestive system of a shark, and the appetite to match. He runs to Dr. Elamine every time he burps, and he can outlast his political opponents in a debate until they finally keel over and beg for death.

He can go to sleep at 2 a.m., make up his mind to get up at 5, and then do it. He’s like a cyborg or something, and when he starts anything, he will not stop until it’s finished. I’ve called him Superman for years. If he ever dies, they’re going to need a team from the Smithsonian to make sure he’s not still breathing. He is truly amazing. I know that’s not good news for you pols, but it’s the truth.

I will continue to ignore his declarations of weakness because I know better.