As a seasoned woman approaching her 58th birthday next week, I have fallen prey to the dreaded ‘middle aged moments’. I am too young to refer to them as ‘senior moments.’ I also call them my ‘wise woman moments,’ since ideally, as we get older, we get wiser. It takes the form of walking into a room, forgetting why and then I need to back to where I was when I had the inital thought, as if I was pushing a re-set button. Oh yes, that’s what it was, as I retrieve it. I find myself at intersections and in a mini moment of panic, I think, “Should I turn right or left?” Good thing I have a GPS that knows where it is going, since I sometimes don’t. When my mother began to experience the same pattern when she in her 40’s as well, she would say that she “had a mind like a sieve.” I visualized the blue and white colander that she had in our kitchen for as long as I can recall and I inherited after she died in 2010. It was as if her thoughts passed through their holes. Now I know what she meant, since sometimes mine leak out of my brain too.

Today while at my friend Lisa’s place, she asked if I could drive to the outdoor arts market where she and our friend Nina and I planned to go.  I said that I needed to move the …..thing out of the back seat of the Jeep first. “You know, the thing with the handle that people lay on for…that’s right, the massage table.” For a moment, I literally could not find the words to describe it and felt a sense of uh oh. “Thing” has become one of my new favorite words. We three fifty-something year old women laughed because they too knew what I was talking about. We agreed to borrow each other’s brains to fill in the gaps.

I think of my brain like a computer that is the repository for a ton of information. The problem isn’t storage. It’s retrieval. Stuff from my childhood jumps up and down, as well as from my adulthood vying for space and supremacy. I can recall (fortunately) my Social Security number, my bank account number, my ATM code, my phone number and address, and a few of my passwords for various blog sites for which I write. All good there. Some phone numbers are plugged into my phone, so I don’t need to remember them. Computers are becoming adjuncts for our brains. Is that a good thing? My Yiddish speaking Russian born grandmother who could converse in five languages, but couldn’t read or write in any of them, had a list of something like a dozen phone numbers of people she called regularly. There were no names next to them and she knew which was which. Remarkable to me.

I call this phenomenon CRS Syndrome (Can’t Remember Sh*t) which gives me a chuckle. My other used to call it “Half-heimers,” as she would say that half the time she could remember things. Blessedly, as she told me shortly before she died, she “Still had her marbles.” I assured her that I would retrieve any that rolled under the couch if need be.” She smiled. Fortunately, it never became necessary.

Before I wrote this article, I was formulating it in my head, as I often do. I had a great ending planned….but now I can’t remember what it was… oh well~