Forget about it

I recently got one of those forwarded e-mails from a friend titled "Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder." Here's the story that accompanied it: I decide to water my garden. As I turn on the hose in the driveway, I look over at my car and decide it needs washing. As I start toward the garage, I notice mail on the porch table that I brought up from the mailbox earlier. I decide to go through the mail before I wash the car. I lay my car keys on the table, put the junk mail in the garbage can under the table, and notice that the can is full. . .

You can see where this is going. There are many more distractions en route to the original errand, and by the end of the day the garden isn't watered, the car isn't washed, the bills aren't paid, the trash isn't emptied, she can't find her car keys, her glasses or the television remote so on, and on and on.

The woman has my sympathies. My own memory has been going, going, gone. But I'm in good company. Lots of my friends have the same symptoms: forgetting a name, or face - and just about anything else. One friend recently went to visit an elderly woman who has Alzheimer's and was startled, and distressed, when the elder friend could remember a name that she could not.

I got so worried at one point that I bought some ginkgo tablets, said to be good for your memory. But I kept forgetting to take them.

So what gives with middle-age memory loss? Some say it's hormonal, that women suffer from it worse than men. I disagree; I just believe most women are so busy multitasking that their synapses sometimes short circuit. (Obviously, I did not go to medical school.)

And how about my husband, a male, who left me at the rest stop? He and my son drove away thinking that my daughter and I were in the car. They got about 30 miles down the road before I finally realized what had happened, borrowed a cellphone, and called him.

"Are you by any chance missing something?" I asked. "Like half your family?"

In the man's (lame) defense, my daughter and I had been sleeping under blankets in the middle and back seat of the minivan. At the rest stop, my husband and son got back in the car, assuming we were still asleep. We were not. We were money-less and phone-less at some hideous pit stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

So much for the estrogen theory. I can guarantee you no mother has ever left half her family at the rest stop. To make matters worse, when I called him he'd just passed a sign that said: "Next Exit, 12 miles." About an hour later, the boys pulled up in the Mom-mobile, looking very sheepish.

My good friend The Doctor says not to worry, we boomers are not all getting mass Alzheimer's. She says it's stress, overload, and sleep deprivation, coupled with the fact that Alzheimer's is constantly in the news, alarming the worried well. Is that why I looked all over the house for my glasses, only to have my husband "find" them - on top of my head? Why I constantly burn stuff in the toaster oven, leave the iron on, or forget what happened in last week's episode of "The Office"?

It could be worse. Pity the brilliant, tough law professor who lectured, in an intimidating voice, to her class: "OK, there are three things you absolutely must remember." Number one, she said, is blah blah blah. Number two is blah blah blah. Then she got to number three and totally blanked. But she quickly recovered by calling on a student: "OK, Mr. Jones, tell the class what number three is."

Another colleague came to work one day wearing two different shoes: On her left foot was a black, pointed-toe shoe, on the right a clunky brown shoe.

And consider my colleague who, after the presidential election, was congratulated on interviewing President Obama. "I'm so jealous," said one editor.

"What do you mean, I interviewed him?" asked my friend. It turned out, she had interviewed the young Obama when he was editor of the Harvard Law Review. And forgot.

Her defense: "But he wasn't Barack Obama yet."

Translation: "Oh, you mean THAT Barack Obama."

The same woman was picking up her daughter's friend and greeted her: "Hi, Catherine."

"Who's Catherine?" asked the girl, whose name was actually Sarah.

Of course, my friend knew that. She really did. She just couldn't for the life of her remember it.