I forget something at least once every five minutes.
I keep lists of long-term projects, daily to-dos, notes on my calendar, and for the tasks like laundry, recycling, and garbage day, I put the reminder right on my kitchen counter where I can’t possibly miss it.
I am an organized person and my systems for remembering things work fairly well until something gets out of alignment.
For example, I pay the piano teacher on my granddaughter’s first lesson of the month, but this month her mother took her to that lesson instead of me. I told my daughter, “I’ll just pay the teacher next week.”
And then I forgot, and when the piano teacher sent a general email to all her students reminding them to pay, I thought, smugly, “How can people do this to her?”
Until my granddaughter’s next lesson, when the teacher tentatively asked me if I’d paid her because she couldn’t find any record of it.
“Of course,” I said. “I always pay you on the first lesson of the month.”
“I know,” she answered, “but would you mind just checking your records?”
And then, while my granddaughter was in the middle of a Bach Fugue, it came to me—I remembered the bit about not being at that first lesson, and how that single change in the universe had thrown my whole memory system off.
I blurted out my discovery with profuse apologies.
The piano teacher is a young woman with a new husband and a newer baby. She cannot afford to have people paying her so late in the month.
The scariest thing about forgetting is the worry that we’ve forgotten something really important but don’t know what it is.
We’ll be idling along thinking everything is fine and dandy, and then, BOOM—it will hit us—that thing we forgot that was really important and should not have been forgotten.
We will suffer the consequences of forgetting.
After the forgetting gets really bad, no one wants you to live alone in your house anymore. They think you will leave a pot unattended on the stove and burn the house down. Or that you will leave the house and not remember how to get back to it.
This is why you have to be vigilant and demonstrate that you are an organized person who can adapt to minor disabilities such as losing your mind along with the various and sundry things you have misplaced and can’t find.
I’m very careful these days not to hide my grandchildren’s Christmas presents too well. I know I will not remember where I put them, so I make sure they’re visible on a shelf in a room that I enter often.
Better to take a chance on the children finding the packages than to end up with no presents for them on Christmas.
And why is it that every time we look for something we’ve lost, it is always found in the last place we look for it?
Or not found at all?
