There are three signs of old age. The first is your loss of memory. The other two I forget.
I’m tellin’ you, folks, it’s getting pretty bad. We rented a movie the other night and didn’t realize until ten minutes into it that we had already seen it … about two weeks ago.
Of course, they make so many movies with similar titles, it could happen to anyone, I guess. I mean, who remembers if it was Angels of Darkness, Angel in the Night, Night Angels, Blue Angels, or Angels of Mercy? I’d have to keep a diary to keep up with them all.
But still, you’d think that as soon as it started, it would occur to one of us that something was vaguely familiar. But no, we sat there for ten minutes.
Some of our friends went on a trip to Europe several years ago. When they returned, all her good jewelry had been stolen. They reported it to the police, collected insurance money, and replaced several of the items. Two years later, she was cleaning out her closet and found the jewelry in a shoe box, just where she had hidden it before their trip.
I wondered at the time how she could have forgotten such a thing. What an airhead, right? Wrong.
That’s what usually happens. You think something’s lost, but then it shows up, and you realize it was never really lost it the first place. As time goes by, it’s getting worse and worse. Now we are finding things we didn’t even know were lost.
Someone in our house is forever misplacing his or her keys, glasses, wallet, car. (You’r e getting old when “getting lucky” means you find your car in the parking lot.) We always know they’re around here somewhere, so we don’t call them “lost”. Just temporarily missing. Until now.
A woman called us yesterday to tell us that her son had found my husband’s wallet on the side of the highway. I guess when we stopped to change drivers it must have fallen out of his lap.
He replied, “Oh, you found my wallet? I didn’t even know I lost it!?” I wish I could have seen the woman’s face and read her mind at that moment. I’m sure she was thinking something along the lines of “What an airhead.”
The good news is now we can empathize with my friend about her missing jewelry. Unfortunately, that’s also the bad news.
