Delayed Embarrassment

Note: This post has nothing to do with the current state of my marriage.  Hooray!

Today I was driving the Boy to his last day of Band Camp.  (Last night, he has his first jazz solo at the summer band concert.  Yay!  Very cool.)  We were listening to the radio when the song "The Impression that I Get" by The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones came on.  This song became my madeleine and slipped me back to when I was a freshman in college.  I was at a fraternity party with music blasting when this super cute boy asked if I liked the English Beat. 

"I like anything with a beat," was my response.  He looked at me, puzzled.  

Fast forward to winter break, 1987.  I am riding with a high school friend and see a cassette in his car by the band The English Beat.  Three months later, I was embarrassed.

I hate it when that happens.

Peach Socks, Extras and a Trip to Alzheimer's Land

This morning I woke and put on a pair of socks.  In Seattle in the spring, it is hard to pick the right pair of socks to wear.  I have summer socks (white and peek out above the ankle) and winter socks (wool, colorful, and come up mid-calf.)  I dug to the back and bottom of the drawer and found a pair of peach colored cotton socks.  Spring socks!  Ta-da!

I looked at the socks, and I couldn't remember where I got them or when I got them.  Did I have these socks for three years or five?  Ten?  Did I get them at Target or did I buy them at a fancy shoe store?  Did John and the kids get them for me at Christmas?  Ack!  Clearly, these socks are not a madeleine in my life.  They did not zoom me back to a sunny day or bring back any fond memories.  Now that my mother has Alzheimer's, I get a little worried when my memory doesn't work when I want it to.

How important is it to remember stuff like where I got a pair of socks?  It is important if I want to buy another pair just like them.  If I were a hunter or a gatherer, it would be useful to remember where I found something.  Other than that, it doesn't matter.  Am I better off clearing out the minutia so I can remember more important things, like when my kids have a field trip and need a special lunch?  Why does it freak me out that I can't remember getting these socks?  Should it?  Or is this a common middle-age brain thing?

I was talking to my friend Diane the other day.  Her daughter has not seen her biological father in ten years.  The girl is now fifteen.  Ten years is an eternity in the life of a child.  Ten years is the change between listening to The Wiggles to Macklemore.  It is the change between being friends with boys to having boyfriends with the middle where girls think boys are silly and/or gross.  These ages are almost unrecognizable to each other.

As a middle aged adult, ten years is nothing.  Unlike childhood time, middle age time is more fluid and amorphous.  I have a friend who recently told me he was 48, and I was shocked.  I remember when he turned 40 and had a party, but I didn't figure that was eight years ago.  I thought he was 42 or 43, which makes no sense because I know he is older than me.  I don't know how I got older but he didn't.

Similarly, I was reading online about a guy who associated the rock band Modest Mouse with college.  I love Modest Mouse, but it seems like they just came out maybe two years ago.  Or was it six years ago?  I'd have to back pedal to figure it out.  My favorite Modest Mouse album came out the last time we were in North Carolina, which was maybe four years ago.  I remember listening to them when we would drive to the Mountlake Terrace Pool every Sunday.  2008?  2010? I suppose I could Google it, but Google has its limits.  Google can't tell me where or when I got the peach socks.

There are other times when I fear I am visiting Alzheimer's Land.  There are time when John will tell me a story about something at work and I don't remember the details.  Usually, the stories involve people I have never met or have heard of before. Usually, there are twelve details in the story, of which two are relevant.  Usually, he tells the story while I am balancing the checkbook, working on a blog post, or otherwise pre-occupied.  I listen, and when he gets to the punchline, I ask him to go back and tell me what the relevant details were.  Conversing with him is like taking the reading comprehension part of a standardized test.  While I love him dearly, I just don't have the bandwidth to take in the all of these details which will not matter to my life six seconds after he tells the story.

Okay, so I may or may not have a memory problem here.  Maybe I am not paying attention.  Not in a bad way.  I pay attention to lots of things he says and does, especially when they pertain to major and minor characters in his world.  The extras, the ones who float on the scene for 30 seconds and I never hear about them again?  Forget about it.

I suppose it is okay to forget about the extras, like peach socks and people who are peripheral in our spouse's lives, but what happens when we forget the main characters?

I talked to my mom on Mother's Day.  Our conversation was pleasant and my mother was upbeat.  This was a surprise for me as my father said she was having a rough week her her short-term memory and getting frustrate.  At the end of the conversation, I said, "Say 'hi' to Dad for me."

"Well," she said and paused.  I could hear the smile in her voice.  "It's not your father anymore.  It is someone else."  She seemed excited to tell me.

I was shocked.  My dad said she had forgotten that they were married. Earlier in the conversation, she mentioned him several times.  I asked her about this new guy, but she didn't have any details.  I am hoping the new guy and my father are the same.

When does the slide between forgetting about socks decline into forgetting about a spouse?  I know those are dramatic differences.  I knew never memory could be so fragile.

Windchimes and Blue Freckles

I had a major find at the Central Library today.  In the gift shop, they were selling journals that were made from recycled hard covered books.  (See http://atticjournals.com.)  "Windchimes," published by Houghton Mifflin, was my third grade reading textbook.

Inside the journal, there are a few pages from the book, including my favorite story, "Freckle Juice" by Judy Blume.  I was thrilled.  Not only was this my 3rd grade book, but this was probably the first story I ever read by Judy Blume.  I devoured her books in 4th, 5th and 6th grade.  I had to bring this home.

This is my madeleine/time machine trip for today, sending me back to Albert Einstein Elementary School in 1978.  After my small reading group read this story, we created a little skit of "Freckle Juice."  I was Sharon, the conniving little girl who sells Andrew her secret family recipe for freckle juice, which included grape juice, mayonnaise, vinegar and a little piece of onion.  I didn't remember Sharon being such a con artist, but she was.  I think I imagined her being nicer than she was, which is a stretch because she is awful.

Robbie played Andrew.   Robbie was the smartest kid in the grade--likely the entire school--and he shocked our group by putting a dozen blue stickers on his face for the scene where Andrew comes to school with blue freckles.  Robbie didn't tell anyone he had planned this -- he just did it.  

My memory is faulty here.  I somehow recall we all were shocked, and the teacher was not pleased, which makes me wonder if he drew the dots on his face with a Sharpie.  Robbie was one of those boys who was 90% brilliant and 10% outlandish, and so it was completely possible.  My memory of 90% brilliance suggests that he would have known better to have drawn on his face and not have done something that absurd.  Yet, this discrepancy in my memory makes me wonder.  The kids would not have been so shocked and the teacher would not have been upset if he had just used stickers.  His 10% outlandishness would have drawn on his face to get a reaction.  

Robbie didn't always use his best judgment, like the time in sixth grade when he rode his dirt bike down a hill in a construction site, crashed and broke his collar bone.  "Hill" is a misnomer.  This was more like a wall of dirt with a straight vertical drop.  If it was a ski slope, it would have been unskiable.  It was remarkable that he didn't break something worse than a collar bone.  I wonder what made him try to bike down the dirt cliff.  He must have been amplifying the reward and minimizing the risk.  It would have been a wild ride if he hadn't gotten hurt.  I didn't witness the ride or the accident, nor did I see anyone else ride down the hill.  Was it peer pressure?  Did other kids make it down successfully?  This was a kid who didn't care about drawing spots on his face.  I doubted he caved to peer pressure.  More likely, he was peer pressure.  Given he was the smartest kid in the school, no one would say he was a bad influence.  No one would say he wasn't a little imp, though, either.

While I had a brother growing up, I never really understood boys until I had a son.  I never understood why Robbie would have done something potentially stupid just "because."  Growing up, I never did anything that I thought was intentionally stupid.  Now I understand a little bit.  (Reading Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid helped me to understand, too.)  Boys, as I have observed, sometimes do things just to see what will happen.  I remember playing on the Sesame Street website with my son when he was little.  There was a little section where he would help Oscar the Grouch sort the trash. The Boy would make mistakes on purpose, just to hear Oscar say "That's not correct!" in his faux grumpy voice.  The Boy would laugh and laugh.  

I wonder now if I give the Boy enough freedom to make those silly mistakes, to draw blue freckles on his face.  I hope he never rides his bike down a dirt cliff, crashes, and breaks a few bones.  Yet, I long for him to be a little imp.  Just a little.

Offline, Salt and my Madeleines

I've been offline for the past two weeks.  The kids had mid-winter break, and then week after was crazy.  During the break, the Boy's Lego Club made it to the First Lego League State Championship in Ellensburg, WA. We also skied for a few days.  All good, but we have been eating out.  A lot.  As a result, I've eaten so much salt in the past two weeks the Atlantic Ocean is jealous.

Speaking of salt... Last night my daughter was skiing and John was working, so the Boy and I ordered pizza for dinner.  We usually get Delfino's, which is a Chicago style place that serves a deep dish spinach.  This is only place west of the Kennedy Expressway that serves deep dish like this.  Anyhow, at the Boy's request, we did not order from Delfino's. We ordered from the national chain that serves this garlic dipping sauce on the side of their pizzas.  Ingredients: soybean oil, water, salt, and then a bunch of chemicals.  I was at the AWP Conference yesterday when a woman read a poem about desire and lack of control written by a prison inmate.  The way this guy feels about cocaine, I feel about this garlic sauce.  This morning, I went to the refrigerator in the basement and ate a piece of cheese bread covered in the sauce for breakfast.  I didn't use a plate.  I just ate it over the box.  Maybe this sauce won't ruin my life and cause me to lose my family or end up in prison, but it could clog my arteries and cause some serious hypertension.  I know this sacue is bad for me, but I could not resist.  I was a victim to its powers.  

And then there was Potbelly for lunch.  Potbelly used to be a one shop operation on Lincoln Ave in Lincoln Park in Chicago, very close to where I lived in my twenties.  The story goes that Potbelly started as a antique shop in the 1970s that started making lunch for its customers.  Soon, the sandwich business took over the antique sales.  Anyhow, John and I used to go to Potbelly on a regular basis for lunch.  On a beautiful summer afternoon, the line would sometimes snake around the place and out the door.  I would get a ham and swiss baked on a hogie roll with mayo, lettuce, tomato, onion, oil and Italian seasonings.  John and I would usually split a bag of chips and a milkshake.  Sometimes we'd just go for a milkshake.  

Now Potbelly is a chain, and there is one on Pike and 4th in downtown Seattle.  This ham sandwich is my madeleine, sending me back through a vortex of time to my twenties, living a yuppie's life in Chicago.  When I had time to wait a half an hour for a sandwich and not worry if one of my children would meltdown from lack of food.  When I could slam a milkshake and not feel like I had to compensate by detoxing on only lettuce, rice and tea for the next two days.  While I love this place, yesterday I left feeling like I was pregnant with a ham sandwich and oatmeal chocolate chip cookie.  Those days of freedom weekends and high metabolism are gone.  

That didn't stop me from returning today.  I wonder how many times Marcel Proust returned to his madeleines.  Did they always bring him back to his childhood, or at some point, did he just remember the last time he had the cookie?  Did he ever decide a cookie was just a cookie and leave it at that?