Sometimes Carol Channing would tell an audience at her nightclub act to ask her questions about her life. One woman asked, “Do you remember the most embarrassing moment you ever had?”
“Yes, I do,” Channing answered. “Next question?”
That sort of savoir-faire—without embarrassment—is what Edith Manley urges when, for example, you stroll in from the family room, open the refrigerator door and forget what you came for.
“So what if you lock your keys in the car,” she says. “Lots of 16-year-olds lock their keys in the car, too.”
Short-term memory loss is like turning gray, needing glasses or requiring a hearing aid. It’s all a part of the aging process, she says.
Nonetheless, it’s vexing, but you can try some techniques to reduce the number of times when someone telephones and asks, “Where are you?” and you experience that sinking feeling as you realize you forgot to meet a friend somewhere.
“Get organized,” Manley suggests. She keeps giant-size, washable, current month and next-month calendars on a wall in her home. She also uses the refrigerator door magnets for notes and a cork board panel in another room. “Use all the memory aids you can find,” she says.
Intoxication does not do a whole lot for the brain’s memory compartment. In addition to the befuddlement booze bestrews, the impact of prescribed or over-the-counter drugs can start you wondering what state you live in. Malnutrition, depression and the couch potato syndrome also take their toll, Manley says.
So if a friend or relative becomes forgetful, “Don’t automatically conclude he or she is out of it,” she says. Check the person’s medication, her isolation, his eating habits.
While in New York, the actor James Cagney saw a man across the steet. “You see that fellow over there?” Cagney asked his wife. “He sat next to me in school. His name is Nathan Skidelsky. Though proud of her husband’s incredible memory, Mrs. Cagney replied, “Prove it.” Cagney went over and said hello. It really was Nathan Skidelsky. But he didn’t remember Jimmy Cagney.
A cause for celebrating is a memory category called “meaning association.” Why? It translates into wisdom, Manley says. All types of cultures going back to prehistoric times revered their elders because their wisdom guided, even rejuvenated the tribe or the community. But somehow that didn’t create a feeling of deja vu. Not in the U.S. of A.
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