As we age, we can feel our memories start fading into the past

"Let us go to the banks of the ocean where the walls rise above the Zuiderzee, long ago I used to be a young man but dear Margaret remembers that for me ..."
-- "THE DUTCHMAN," Michael Peter Smith

For the last few days, I have been listening to at least a dozen versions of this song on YouTube. For some reason, it is a song that is resonating with my heart and mind in a way only a few others have touched me.




You see, there are times I feel my own memory is starting to fade, and I don't have anyone to remember the first 40 years or so for me. Oh, I still remember freakish things ...

"Come and listen to the story of a man named Jed. ..."

That and a half dozen other TV theme songs from the '50s and '60s must have been permanently jammed into my frontal lobe, but aside from two or three things, I hardly remember anything at all about the five years I spent in elementary school. I cannot picture in my mind my bedroom that was my inner sanctum from 1957 until nearly the end of 1961.

I still have a feel for the living room, dining room and kitchen. I can see them in my memory, but I cannot remember my own bedroom.

It's not difficult to remember my room in our home in Virginia. We moved there when I was 13 and my mother still owns the house. I visited just three years ago. But there are plenty of things I have all but lost about the years I was growing up there.

I'm 64 years old.

When I was 24.

I'm never going to be 54 ... or 44 ... or 34 ... let alone younger than that. In fact, one of my two children will be 34 this year.

When Pauline was 24, she started her career with the Department of State. When Virgile was 24, he competed in an Ironman Triathlon in France.

When I was 24, I bought a Pinto.

And that was the high point of the year. Probably one of the high points of my twenties. Is it any wonder my memories are vanishing into the ether?

It isn't just the past either. At least half the time I leave the house to run errands, I forget at least one of the things I'm supposed to be taking with me. As for remembering other things, like phone numbers, I can't think of any other than my own that I just remember without help anymore.

Oh, I remember two or three phone numbers that were useful to me 40 years ago. I even remember the Social Security number of someone I haven't spoken to in 32 years.

That's the way things are. It's like that old Rodney Dangerfield joke about appealing only to people who could do him absolutely no good. My memory is great of useless stuff, useless on stuff that matters.




"He's mad as he can be, but Margaret only sees that sometimes. Sometimes she sees her unborn children in his eyes."