Memory. The farrier was here today and we gasbagged as usual. One thing about talking with the farrier is the ease with which we move from solving the world's problems to horse gossip to humour and back again. The conversations never get too personal but after years of chatting we know each other well enough to be comfortable. We were talking today about memory. Or I was. I'd read this article on Huffington Post (and have just spent 15 minutes trying to find it again to reference here, without success) about a 92 year old woman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, a dancer, yogini, who lives up three flights of stairs, still cooks for her family, has a personal trainer and tangos every week but who, to her mortification, briefly forgot the name of her daughter. So now she practices, like she does her dance routines, a memory game. She chooses 10 random words and memorizes them. The trick is to remember them the next day.
Sounds easy, huh? Uh huh. It's not. I started with five words. Havana, verily, car yard, have forgotten the other two. That was the first day. The second day, ten words, which I remembered for that day but couldn't recall the next. The following day better and the day after better. Yesterday I remembered the ten words for that day AND the ten words from the day before.
But I can feel my brain creaking with the strain. Thought learning a language would be enough but obviously it's not. I've always been poor with memory. Years ago when I was going through a near destitute period I didn't have enough money for the laundromat so I'd wash the sheets in the bathtub of my rental house. I'd walk up and down the tub while I tried to memorize some of John Donne's poems. Unsuccessfully. I couldn't retain the words. Like smoke on the wind, gone with the first distraction.
So now there's another to do on my to do list. Growing older is inevitable but if I'm going to grow old in a way that suits me I'll have to work at it. No coasting allowed. In some ways being alive is harder now than it ever was. Perhaps because I'm aware of how much is at stake. I see how easily health and mental acuity can slip away. How quickly people go from hale and hearty to the rest home. I'm not going there. Ever. Made up my mind. Will die at home or quickly in hospital after falling off my horse or some such thing. No going slowly and meekly into that good night.
So part of my daily walk is devoted to memorizing ten random words. There is a pleasant side effect to this. The words themselves. The last five words from yesterday were: yellow muffin pulls analogy ... darn, I've forgotten the last word. Typical. No matter. What is important are the words. Because I'm concentrating so deeply on the words, I hear and see them at the same time, they assume an importance in themselves and in relationship to the words next to them. Like really bad poetry.
And I miss words. I miss the companionship of words. Words reflecting me back to myself, very narcissistic perhaps but when I was traveling solo and had no friends, vitally important. Again, in a way, as we all are ultimately, I am traveling solo, traversing the arc of life on a slippery slope of destiny. There is only one outcome. I accept that. But I still want to describe the trip to myself in vain hopes that I might understand what it all meant, my four score years and ten. A story book in words and pictures. I've got the pictures and now I'm writing (again) the words.
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