Remember where you parked your car on your last trip to the mall? If you’re old enough to remember Dallas, how about who shot J.R.? Any luck recalling the name of the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1988, the one who debated Dan Quayle? How about the name of the second person you dated in high school?

It’s unnerving to find that my once much more dependable memory has turned against me. In the twilight of my life, I sometimes go from one room to another then stand there, wondering what I came in for in the first place. My best advice to myself: Get used to it!

On the other hand, I’ll bet you can recall your first telephone number. It was easier then: no area code to remember, no “Press One for … .” And I’m sure you can recite your Social Security number – just be sure no one is listening.

I fight back. I make lists. If I’m feeling emotionally secure enough at the moment, I might even ask someone else to remind me of the name of a movie or a song I once loved. Would that I had a personal, reliable, multimegabyte mental hard disk with a good search function!

It was the German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer who gave his name to the horrible kind of dementia that comes from organic disease; but the kind of intermittent, temporary memory loss I’m talking about is – I suspect – more often the result of inattention. On the general theory that everything has to be somewhere, I recognize that the thing I’m trying to remember right now has not vanished. Later, when I’m not staring directly at it, it may come back to me. It was lurking in the little gray cells all the time. Were I less distracted by my incessant flow of thoughts, plans, ideas, and feelings, I’d be able to bring my full attention to the tasks of focusing, searching, finding, and retrieving the memory I want. But – like you – I’m merely human: a flawed being, tantalized by the vision of who I could be while staying stuck with who I am.

We’re all like the two-headed Janus, looking forward and looking backward at the same time. When I was young, it was easier. I hadn’t accumulated so much of a past to reexamine. But as I’ve aged, I’m increasingly tempted to explore the trail I’ve left. It may be that it helps avert my eyes from my future.

I find that it pays to keep trying to hone the cutting edge of my memory. Mental muscles, like physical ones, gain strength and tone if reinforced with frequent practice. Whether I’m trying to gather memories to hand off to the generations that will succeed me, or merely to savor and revisit parts of my own journey, I believe that my persistent attempt to search my past fortifies that ability.

I have spotty and highly selective remembrance of some of my triumphs and disappointments, my successes and my failures. Some of the memories that return make me want to cover my face with my hands, saying to myself, with embarrassment, “Did I do that?” But there are other fragments that generate a small, inward smile of remembered pleasure or even pride. As I think back in time I remember others – some now quite old, others gone – who enriched my understanding or influenced my beliefs. I’m grateful to them. But just as my lifelong struggle against gravity is doomed to failure, so is my persistence in searching for a mind that will cough up the information I demand when I want it. I continue to strive because I hate feeling like a helpless victim. I continue to labor to remember, to revisit my earlier selves, as a way of trying to make sense of where I’ve been, where I am, and how I became the me that’s telling you all this.

Now, where did I put my keys? Standing in the market, what else was I going to buy? Oh, that vice presidential candidate?
Lloyd Bentsen.

Hank Basayne is a San Franciscan who doesn’t care who shot J. R.
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