Remembering About Forgetting

Memory is big these days. Especially for those of us getting on in years. I'm celebrating my 75th birthday later this month. I don't know which I'm more afraid of losing: my life, my health or my memory. The last, of course is part of a fear of Alzheimer's disease, which curses a growing number of older people every year. So I am a sucker for memory aids, picking up magazines in doctors' offices with headlines like "Goodbye Senior Moments."

That was a particularly meaningful headline for me because I've had a few embarrassing senior moments in my part-time, summer job as a narrator on the Tourmobile buses that take tourists around the Mall in Washington and nearby Arlington Cemetery. Over eight summers, I've gotten pretty good at remembering interesting facts: that Washington married the richest widow in Virginia, and that Robert E. Lee's wife, Mary,was Martha's great granddaughter; that Jefferson, who wrote that "all men are created equal," had 200 slaves (an elderly southern woman once objected to my telling people that, explaining that a lot of black people liked being slaves); and that FDR, whom I remember as a kid was never seen in public in his wheelchair, doubtless would, if he could, order the Secret Service to toss the statue of him in a wheelchair into the Potomac River so future generations would stop being reminded that he had polio and couldn't walk.

The most embarrassing of my senior moments came one day when the Tourmobile bus stopped in front of the White House Visitors Center. Just across Pennsylvania Avenue is the Willard Hotel, a Washington landmark. I pointed out, as I always did, that the big white building on the corner was a place where Lincoln had once stayed and conducted staff meetings, and where Grant frequented the lobby bar on a daily basis, and coined the word "lobbyists" to describe the people who bellied up next to him to plead for presidential favors. But for the life of me, I couldn't remember the name of the place.

I thought I'd gotten away without it when a white-haired woman sitting right in front asked me the name. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I can't remember, I'm having a senior moment," I explained, embarrassed. I was relieved when she and other senior citizens on the bus sympathized, and all the passengers got a good laugh at my expense. But I resolved never to let it happen again. So I devised a memory aid to use if it ever did.

Before retiring, I'd worked for almost 30 years at NBC News in New York and had a nodding acquaintance with the Today Show's longtime, cheerful weatherman, Willard Scott. A large American flag flies atop the Willard Hotel. I stared, and stared, and stared at that flag, imagining Willard's smiling face on it instead of the Stars and Stripes. And I did so good a job at imagining that afterwards, every time I looked at the hotel, I saw Willard's
face flying from the rooftop. I never forgot the name of the hotel again.

But one time I did have another problem. The bus halted at the Visitors Center, I looked across the street at the hotel. And I saw, as always, Willard Scott's face on the American flag. For once, that stopped me. Why, I asked myself, was I looking at the Stars and Stripes and seeing Willard Scott's face instead? It was a senior moment brought on by my solution to a senior moment. Sometimes you just can't win.

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[Sandy Goodman - Huffpost Blogger]

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