The Beginning of Forgetting

The Kettle of Fish pub hosts a monthly reading that I've been invited to since I've joined the Writer's House family.  It's something I'm always too tired for but end up walking out of feeling fuzzy and contented, like a child who has just been read to before bed.  The new, up and coming authors usually prattle on about life and their hands move about in front of them with a sweaty underconfidence that can sometimes be distracting, but for the most part I'm genuinely entertained on these Wednesday evenings.  

Tonight, the first gentleman was 20.  (20!) He reminded me of the kid in Finding Forrester, minus the whole creepy Sean Connery mentor thing.  He had obviously been through a lot and told his sad tale so everyone in the audience could sigh and then shake their heads slowly, closed-mouth-smiling in turn. 

The second woman had a theatrical look to her, the longish, kinky hair and the almost too obviously homemade scarf hanging across her shoulders and down past her nervous knees.  She read from a memoir about her mother with Alsheimers who had just recently passed away.  Her anecdotes were subtle and hilarious, complete with a lot of the necessary repetition that goes hand in hand with living with someone with the disease.  As all diseases do, this one puzzles me to no end.  How can certain things in one's mind just simply vanish, like their own daughter's name, or the street where they have been living for the past 40 years?  Then I remembered, (not like I'd forgotten), that I have been feeling the initial pangs of the horrible disease as of late.  I don't actually think I have it, but I've been frightening myself and others lately with this strange lack of recognition for things I have said or done in the very recent past.  I can recite the first and last names of everyone in my cabin at camp when I was 7 years old, but I can't figure out where I put my glasses when I wake up in the morning.  One morning I even walked out the door and started down the sidewalk without them on, only to realize it after a few seconds of blurred squinting.  Lyrics to songs stick with me forever after only a couple of listens, but I can't remember entire chunks of a conversation I soberly had yesterday.  There's a term for people choosing what they remember, but, of course, that term has somehow slipped my mind.  Everyone forgets things, I know, but my case is beginning to scare me.  I get nervous fast-forwarding a few decades when I'm actually at the age when this is supposed to happen, that I'll walk around without a speck of my former life inside my brain.  That thought, in a twisted way, might not be all that bad...which reminds me of a quote from an Alexander Pope poem that a pretty good movie placed into it's title:

No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole;

Rise Alps between us! and whole oceans roll!

Ah, come not, write not, think not once of me, 

Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each prayer accepted, each wish resigned.

The third woman was short and stalky and had written an entire novel about her cat, Homer, so naturally I politely turned my listening ears off and let my gaze drift outside towards the redgreen Christmas lights on the busy street.