Memory is a Strange Thing

I fear I am losing my mind. Or at least my words. I’m losing track of words.

“Memory is a strange thing”

Either Dr. Louise Banks in the movie “Arrival”, or the Barenaked Ladies’ song “Enid”

Maybe ten years ago, I was thinking about grain elevators, as I often do, and I realized that I couldn’t remember the name of one of the towns on the Carman subdivision near Winnipeg. This line is a classic Prairie branchline that had towns and grain elevators every eight miles or so.

“Sanford, Brunkild, uh, uh, Homewood, Carman.” I just could not remember the name of the town between Brunkild and Homewood.

Eventually I looked it up – Sperling – and tried to commit it to memory. Today I call that the “Sperling test”. If I can recall that name, I’m having a good memory day.

I know that some memory loss is an effect of aging. I know. It’s also a sign of dementia, and I worry about that.

It’s not that I forget things. I lose the ability to access them.

A few years ago, I realized that I had forgotten the name of a nephew. I could remember his sister’s name but not his name. I could picture him in my mind… but his name escaped me. Eventually I remembered it by thinking about the larger, extended family and listing out relatives.

An Analogy

Do you remember card catalogs in libraries? Banks of cabinets, each with multiple drawers containing rows of cards? Each card had some details on a book – title, author, ISBN, publication year – and where it could be found in the library. Usually they were arranged by author, and topic, and perhaps other criteria.

I feel like I recall memories like looking in a card catalog. I’m talking or thinking, and some librarian is racing around in the caverns of my memories, looking things up in the card catalog and fetching the memories.

Sometimes, though, the card is missing.

The book (memory) is still in the library. I just can’t find where it is.

I have developed strategies to recall these memories. I “come at them” from a different angle. I think of the context. I think of what letter the word, place, or name starts with. I think of similar things. I’m trying a different index in the card catalog. Sometimes it works.

Blame the Russians

We returned from the Soviet Union late in the summer of 1979. We had a home in the “country” in Geary, outside Oromocto, New Brunswick. While we were overseas, my parents rented it out, so we came back to the same house we lived in prior to moving to the USSR.

Soon after we returned, a person approached me and started talking to me like he knew me. I had no recollection of him at all.

He told me that we were good friends before I moved away two years before, and showed me a few photos from his family’s albums. Sure enough, there I was. I still didn’t remember him. Robin and I became friends (again) but I still feel bad about that.

I have practically no memories from before we went to Moscow when I was 9. I feel the few memories that I do have are implanted memories – stories people told me that I have absorbed and turned into false memories.

I jokingly blame the Russians for my memory loss, since my memories are truncated at the point where we moved to the USSR. I’m 99% joking, but it is a known fact that the Soviets were blasting microwave signals at the American embassy for more than 20 years. Who knows what other skullduggery they were up to?

I started writing about my experiences in the Soviet Union a few years ago because I was worried that I would lose my memories of being there. I wanted to record them somewhere.

Scrabble

Trying to remember names is a bit like playing Scrabble to me. I have a mental box of a dozen letters or so, and I’m shaking them around, trying different combinations to see if any of them spark a memory.

I was doing that one morning, trying to remember the name of the town where I had a bit of a spiritual moment photographing a train passing the grain elevator. I thought it started with R… maybe RO… I juggled letters around in my head as I laid in bed. Nothing was fitting.

It finally fell together while I was showering… M O R L A T C H… no… MORTLACH. That’s it.

Much Ado About Nothing?

I don’t know, maybe I am making too much of this. Maybe this is a normal part of aging.

Regardless, there’s nothing that can be done, so I will try to stay positive, write things down, and hope for your forgiveness when I forget your name.