Have We Met?

There are things that are just forgettable. They lack the recollective Velcro necessary to stick to whatever enables us to remember the middle name of our fifth grade teacher or the name of that little lollipop-shaped organ that houseflies have in their armpits. That would be the haltere for those who are curious. It took years and numerous visits to the dictionary before I finally got a handle on “empirical” and I am still a bit wobbly on “existential” and have given up entirely on “heuristic.” But it has only been fairly recently that I started losing words that had always been reliably available when needed. “Expedient” was the first to go. At the time I first noticed it had gone walkabout I needed it on an almost daily basis for reports I was writing about the design and construction of expedient roads and expedient runways. I kept crashing into this pothole in the narrative that needed to be filled, but the word was gone, forcing me to wander off down the hall for a quick look in my mailbox in case somebody had put something in it in the 15 minutes since the last time I had looked. Sometimes the word would emerge and sometimes I had to scratch through old reports until I found it. After 6 or 7 episodes like this I finally wrote it down on a Post-It note and stuck it to my computer screen.

Other words have slipped through the cracks since then, but usually it is possible to prattle around them, or substitute some generic expression such as “machine” or “garment” when what we mean is “press ductor” or “dirndl.” And of course in the worst case there is always “thing.”

Another difficult cognitive area is faces, names, and the association of the two. It is more difficult to tell when these fade away since the world is full of people we have never met and do not know and if we have forgotten somebody, they could just as easily be one of these.

There is a special place in hell reserved for those who come up to us out of context 20 years since last contact and cry “Hi, Deborah – remember me?”

Not so long ago I was summoned for jury duty in Middlebury. The specified day was the worst sort of winter day, dark, snow-sodden and sleety. I was living in Burlington at the time and therefore had to get up extra early to slog though the muck down to the courthouse, traffic was bad, I couldn't find the right door, and when I finally paddled into the jury pool I was in a full-blown funk and loaded for bear, which was not a good time for this perky, portly and grizzled citizen to step right up and inquire “Hi, Deborah – remember me?”

I didn't, of course.

“No,” I replied.

“I'm Dougy Griswold,” he explained as if this should mean something to me. I stretched my mouth a little in what a charitable person might interpret as polite inquiry.

“I used to cut the grass out at your place,” he continued. And finally I remembered a skinny boy with dark hair who was the son of a cousin of the wife of a friend of my father's who needed some summer work and was paid to cut the grass and the flower beds and the low-hanging branches. Since my father had arranged this it must have been before 1992 when he died, and I am pretty sure it was just one season since I don't think the peonies would have survived being mowed flat more than that, so I quickly forgave myself for my memory lapse. Unfortunately, I saw him again perhaps a year after the courthouse encounter by which time I had completely forgotten him again. This time he had the good sense not to ask if I remembered him since I plainly didn't, but there was a brittleness in his voice when he explained “Dougy Griswold.” The next time I saw him I remembered his face at least and bestowed my chirpiest possible smile upon him, and now finally I've got his identity filed away somewhere close where I can get at it as needed. Like “expedient.”

With these cautionary examples of things that were once familiar having mutated into comic strip balloons that drift in and out of the frames, I am alarmed by the possibility that whole episodes may have faded to grey, obliterated by more recent events. What if I had been kidnapped by pirates on Otter Creek and carried off to Buenos Aires in their drug smuggling boat and locked in a castle along with a Spanish sculptor and a Bulgarian wine merchant and had steamy affairs with both and finally escaped by crawling up the chimney and across the tiles and turrets of the castle and scrambled down a trumpet vine into an alley leading to squalid streets seething with cutthroats and con men, madams and jewel thieves, and then to the docks and stowed away on a Russian tramp steamer and finally made my way back home after lurid adventures in a dozen pestilential ports, and what if all of this was completely obliterated by my recent discovery that there are rats in the basement.

Sadly, I'll never know unless some swarthy stranger accosts me in Hannaford's one day and growls, in a Bulgarian accent, “Hi, Deborah – remember me?”