I mentally file away little Dave incidents for possible future use in this column. Successfully retrieving them from my mental storage vault, though, is never guaranteed. Just last night, I had forgotten the particulars of one recent Dave adventure, but I was sure he would remember the incident because, I mean, he had lived it. “Dave,” I said, “do you remember that time when you lost your shovel?”
OK, I admit it was a poor opening question; losing shovels around here is not a one-time event. It’s more like an occupation. Also, it is never wise or productive to ask David questions after 9 p.m. Still, I really wanted to use the story, so I was willing to play the odds.
He looked at me with absolutely no expression on his face. “You mean when it was ‘lost’ in the garden?” That, by the way, was a rude dig by Dave. He was implying that I had taken his shovel and left it in the garden where he couldn’t find it. As if that ever happens.
“No! I mean the funny time. When you left it in a field somewhere and weeks later came across it still standing in the row.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Dave, it was really funny. You had looked and looked for that shovel. We laughed about it, remember?”
“How long ago was this?” he asked suspiciously. It had only been last spring, but I gave up. Obviously, the file for that memory had been corrupted and was no longer retrievable. It’s something that keeps happening more and more often to both of us. In fact, I’m becoming jealous and protective of what little working memory I have left.
Who exactly is deciding which memories get stored in my brain, anyway? Why don’t I get to pick what’s up in my own rafters? I never had much intellectual property to work with in the first place, so I assure you I would have been more selective. Apparently, the information that is gumming up the works in my cranium is old ’70s and ’80s commercials. It seems I can remember, “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is!” (Alka-Seltzer for the win), but I can’t remember my next-door neighbor’s name. It’s a darn inconvenient glitch, let me tell you, when that neighbor is standing on my doorstep, and we’ve only known each other for 20 years. She certainly didn’t need to know that “like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” but I could have told her that. I could also have told her which cereal Mikey likes (Life). But as to what to call her, I would have paid a lot to know.
It’s not like my family even watched that much television growing up. I mean, we watched more than we should have, but not nearly as much as we could have. We were actually the most deprived children in America. Saturday morning cartoons would barely be getting rolling (Looney Tunes out of the gate), when Mom would appear armed with a chore chart and Comet bathroom cleaner. Still, somehow and somewhere, I managed to absorb the plot of every single Scooby Doo mystery. Or is it that they all have the same plot? Either way, right now there are many more important things I need to know – I’d start with the password to our checking account.
Of course, it’s not just television commercials taking up the space I could be using to find my car in the grocery store parking lot. I’d like to tell Mrs. Odell, my dear, long-suffering, diligent eighth-grade English teacher, that I can still recite “Breathes there a man with soul so dead” for 16 lines, word for word. I have phrases from that poem – “concentered all in self” and “vile dust from whence he sprung” – glued to my hippocampus eternally, yet in all these years I have never found occasion to use them. I also have bits of Shakespeare banging around up there, the math “FOIL” method and my grandmother’s phone number (***-1939). And what good has it all done me?
Last fall I had some garden connector tubing I needed to store over the winter. It was too long to conveniently fit anywhere and too rigid to wind, but then I hit upon the brilliant idea of just pushing it into some of Dave’s gated pipe and letting it winter there. I was pretty proud of my solution. Not proud enough, though, to find room for its location in my skull. I have no idea how many places I looked for that tubing this spring. Most sobering, there was never any guarantee that I’d have found it at all. There’s always a 50/50 chance that anything I buy, put away or even set down for a minute will be lost to me forever. And if you ever want to steal anything from me, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. Just ask to borrow it. I’ll keep looking for it for years. And Dave and I will blame each other just for fun.
Luckily, I have people in my life who are willing to remember things for me. Of course, I don’t get to pick what those things are either. With the same accuracy that I can remember that Big Macs have “two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onion on a sesame seed bun,” my kids can remember every, single, solitary time I may have let a little “@$#%^” slip. Just ask them. But do they tell people about all the times that I don’t swear? It’s a rigged system.
Someday I realize that Dave and I will probably spend all our time wandering the fields looking for lost shovels. At that point, I might not remember my name, but I will be able to tell you that Ace is “the place with the helpful hardware man.” Maybe that’s all I really need to know.
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