I Remember Nothing [1]
By the way, when we finally learned the title that night, we all agreed it was a bad title. No wonder we didn’t remember it.
I am going to Google for the name of that movie. Be right back.…
It’s Reversal of Fortune.
How is one to remember that title? It has nothing to do with anything.
But here’s the point: I have been forgetting things for years, but now I forget in a new way. I used to believe I could eventually retrieve whatever was lost and then commit it to memory. Now I know I can’t possibly. Whatever’s gone is hopelessly gone. And what’s new doesn’t stick.
The other night I met a man who informed me that he had a neurological disorder and couldn’t remember the faces of people he’d met. He said that sometimes he looked at himself in a mirror and had no idea whom he was looking at. I don’t mean to minimize this man’s ailment, which I’m sure is a bona fide syndrome with a long name that’s capitalized, but all I could think was, Welcome to my world. A couple of years ago, the actor Ryan O’Neal confessed that he’d recently failed to recognize his own daughter, Tatum, at a funeral and had accidentally made a pass at her. Everyone was judgmental about this, but not me. A month earlier, I’d found myself in a mall in Las Vegas when I saw a very pleasant-looking woman coming toward me, smiling, her arms outstretched, and I thought, Who is this woman? Where do I know her from? Then she spoke and I realized it was my sister Amy.
You might think, Well, how was she to know her sister would be in Las Vegas? I’m sorry to report that not only did I know, but she was the person I was meeting in the mall.
All this makes me feel sad, and wistful, but mostly it makes me feel old. I have many symptoms of old age, aside from the physical. I occasionally repeat myself. I use the expression, “When I was young.” Often I don’t get the joke, although I pretend that I do. If I go see a play or a movie for a second time, it’s as if I didn’t see it at all the first time, even if the first time was just recently. I have no idea who anyone in People magazine is.
I used to think my problem was that my disk was full; now I’m forced to conclude that the opposite is true: it’s becoming empty.
I have not yet reached the nadir of old age, the Land of Anecdote, but I’m approaching it.
I know, I know, I should have kept a journal. I should have saved the love letters. I should have taken a storage room somewhere in Long Island City for all the papers I thought I’d never need to look at again.
But I didn’t.
And sometimes I’m forced to conclude that I remember nothing.
For example: I met Eleanor Roosevelt. It was June 1961, and I was on my way to a political internship at the Kennedy White House. All the Wellesley/Vassar interns drove to Hyde Park to meet the former first lady. I was dying to meet her. I’d grown up with a photograph in our den of her standing with my parents backstage at a play they’d written. My mother was wearing a corsage and Eleanor wore pearls. It was a photograph I always thought of as iconic, if I’m using the word correctly, which, if I am, it will be for the first time. We were among the thousands of Americans (mostly Jews) who had dens, and, in their dens, photos of Eleanor Roosevelt. I idolized the woman. I couldn’t believe I was going to be in the same room with her. So what was she like that day in Hyde Park, you may wonder. I HAVE NO IDEA. I can’t remember what she said or what she wore; I can barely summon up a mental picture of the room where we met her, although I have a very