What’d You Say My Name Was…?

Another Repost from Facebook.....

What’d You Say My Name Was…?

by Steve Fouse on Sunday, March 13, 2011 at 4:49pm

Lately, I’ve been noticing more than a few side-effects of reaching the time of my life when my age is a speed limit. Seems like my joints ache more and I get tired easier and stay tired longer. Also, I’ve noticed a few little memory lapses that are annoying. These are not completely new, but they seem to be occurring more often.

I had an example of this last week. I was trudging away on the cross-trainer at the Y on Friday morning, watching Fox and Friends on TV. A young man came on to report on the quake in Japan. He identified himself as Peter Doocy. Familiar, I thought. Oh, yeah, one of the anchors of Fox and Friends is named Doocy. This must be his son, I thought. He’s probably working as a college intern. I was sure that this was the case, because he also looks like his dad. I just couldn’t remember his dad’s name. Mike or Bob, or something like that, one of those single-syllable man names. But I knew it wasn’t Mike or Bob… What was that guy’s name? I knew that I knew his name.

It’s not really a big deal that I couldn’t remember Mr. Doocy’s first name, but it annoys me because I have always had a great memory. I still do if you ask me about something that happened sometime back in the last millennium. 1974 I remember like it was yesterday. (Seems like it was.) The last ten minutes is sometimes a mystery to me.

I have always been the family historian. Being an army family, we moved a lot and I have always kept a list in my mind of when we move here and when we moved there. I could figure out how old I was when something happened if I remembered where we were living at the time. My parents would ask me the names of neighbors from the 1960s and I always knew.

My talent for this was always particularly useful to my dad, who was never that great at remembering even when he was a young man. He was particularly bad with people’s names. He sometimes slaughtered the pronunciation, so that Capt. Bonial (“bone-ee-ul”) became “Capt. Bonnell,” and Sgt. Mirabella (Italian for “beautiful view, “ so it was “Meera-bella”) became “Sgt. Marrbella.” Other times, he didn’t mispronounce the names, he just didn’t get them quite right. My favorite example of this is Mary Hazel Head.

Mrs. Head was our neighbor when I very young, about five or so, and during part of the time we lived next to them, my dad was in Korea. Maybe that explains why he could not remember Mary Hazel’s name. The Heads were good neighbors and my mom was fond of them. Their son John and I were playmates. The dad was Kenneth. John and Kenneth and Mary Hazel Head. It seemed impossible to me that anyone would ever forget this.

Anyway, the Heads moved from our neighborhood and then we left Lawton, first for Kansas, and then for Germany. When we moved back to Ft. Sill, Mom invited the Heads over for a cook-out. Dad had no trouble with John and Kenneth’s names, but he kept calling Mary Hazel, “Mary Ann” or “Mary Ellen” or “Mary Beth.” It seemed to me that he called her every Mary name there was except Sister Mary Elephant. All the adults were embarrassed by this, because it is the ultimate Faux Pas to forget a friend’s name. It only amazed me, because I had no frame of reference for forgetting a name. I can’t say that anymore.

As Dad got older, his issue with names only got worse, and he often called on me to identify someone whose name he was trying to think of. When he was young, it didn’t seem to matter to him much if he knew someone’s name, but as he aged, he often seemed desperate to think of whatever elusive thing he knew that he knew, but just couldn’t quite remember. Now I know how he felt.

He would say, “Hey, what’s that ole boy’s name at church?”

“Which ole boy, Dad?”

“You know that ole boy and that old gal he’s married to…. They sit up there by that fat old guy, what’s his name?.... Oh, you know who I mean; they sit over there by the organ. Always shouting ‘Amen.’ You know who I mean… His cousin used to be married to what’s-her-name’s sister.”

“You mean Eddie Worthington?”

“No, hell, I know Eddie Worthington. It’s that other ole boy. He’s always wearing those pants.”

“Mr. Miller?”

“No, why would I be trying to that think of that bean brain? You know who I mean; they’ve been going there for years. “ He would snap his fingers really loud, the way he always did when he was trying to think of something, as if that would help me remember.

“Do you mean Bob Swanagon?”

“Yeah, that’s him. What’s his wife’s name?”

“Vi. What about them?”

“What?”

“What were you going to say about them? Why were you trying to remember the Swanagons’ names?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t remember. Something your mother brought up, I guess…"

Like so many other things about getting older, it never occurred to me that I would ever be plagued with anything like my Dad’s issues with memory. But now it happens pretty often, although I don’t think I’m quite as bad as Dad used to be. Earlier today Dana said, “What were you going to say?”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Yes you were. You said, ‘Hey, Listen.’ Then you were distracted by something on Facebook. What were you going to say?”

“I don’t have a clue. I don’t even remember saying ‘Hey, Listen….” Another train of thought jumps the track. I call this not being able to remember that you forgot something. It always makes me wonder what else I’ve forgotten that I can’t even remember I forgot.

So, anyway, back to Mr. Doocy. I have a few memory tricks I try when something escapes me. One of them is to try not to think about what I want to remember and just wait until it “bubbles up.” This often works well if I am not desperate (like my Dad to used to be) to think of what I forgot.

But if I really want to know now, there are other things I try to use to jar loose those stubborn memories. One is to think of things associated with the thing I am trying to remember. Logical, right?

So, I tried to remember the other anchors on Fox and Friends. Gretchen Carlson, the pretty blonde, came to me right away. Then I remembered that the guy that’s not Doocy has an Irish name… Brian something! Yeah, Brian Kilmeade!

So, by now I was feeling a lot less lame, because, after all, I had identified two out of three of the Fox and Friends people. I had begun to feel pretty smart until I finally did remember Mr. Doocy’s first name.

I had been on the right track with the one-syllable man name idea. I was also right to feel sure that I should have known Mr. Doocy’s first name.

That’s because his name is Steve Doocy.