I distinguished myself in a meeting the other day when asked if I knew another attendee. “No,” I said, “we haven’t been introduced, but glad to meet you.”
“Barbara,” said the friend sitting next to me, “you do know her! You spent four hours in a meeting with her in January!” Well, I thought to myself, that was January, this was October for heaven’s sake. Aloud, I allowed as how my friend was right and I was sorry about that “aged thing” and the fact was, that once reminded, I did indeed remember.
As I busily administered figurative kicks to my nether regions, I mentally reflected on lines from a poem I find myself quoting all too often: “I got used to the arthritis, To my dentures I’m resigned, I can manage my bifocals, But God, I miss my mind!” Then an intuitive gal at the meeting told us that her mother used to call these aberrations Intellectual Interludes. Now that’s a term I can live with – and actually rejoice in. It sounds so classical and so . . . ageless.
Actually, there are loads of terms for these senior moments. The late Marilyn Weber, a dear friend and a former news editor of this paper, used to call them Cranial Brownouts, especially during deadlines. Other terms include Mental Glitches, Mature Flashes and according to Frank Kaiser, writing on the internet, Brain Bloat. This, he insists, is the result of 50 or 60 years of cramming too much stuff into one’s head.
This was also a deduction of Sherlock Holmes. He once explained his total lack of interest in anything non-criminal to Dr. Watson by comparing his own detective’s brain to an attic with finite space. Rather than fill it thoughtlessly, he rejected all but what was important to him, i.e., facts of any mysterious occurrences that came his way.
Multi-tasking in today’s fast-paced living style can cause stress at any age and surely help produce senior moments. PhD Carrie Hill offers six tips to reduce these incidences: (1) do one thing at a time; (2) note how things look, smell, taste and feel as well as what’s happening, to remember something in multiple ways; (3) replay memories mentally to reinforce them; (4) get enough sleep; (5) learn stress management techniques; and (6) reduce mental clutter (remember Sherlock!) by using calendars, lists and other aids.
Maybe this tally will help another friend who assures me that her neighborhood bridge group can almost never remember who just dealt the cards and she says, “And forget chit chatting! There’s no way we can indulge in that any more!” I guess it’s just play or stray for that group.
Ah well, there are all kinds of theories and suggested solutions, everything from glucose intolerance, to computer programs to board games to the assurance that proper diet and regular exercise will help keep us mentally sharp. In the meantime, we can fall back on The Senility Prayer as promulgated by the Dull Men’s Club, “God . . . grant me the senility to forget the people I’ve never liked, the good fortune to run into the ones that I do like, and the eyesight to see the difference.”
As for me, I’m sticking with Intellectual Interludes.