a-ha!!! No, that's not it.

If there is one thing I discovered by going to my high school reunion it is that if a person was a jerk 35 years ago, the chances are excellent that they are still a jerk, no matter what the occasion or situation. That doesn’t take a lot of insight, but sometimes you might feel that people can mellow a bit with age. I found that wasn’t the case. What I did find was that my sense of recognition of people wasn’t hampered at all with age. The names and faces came to me easily, as did the forgotten stories of some of the dumber things I had done in my youth. I know, I know, that list seems to get longer and longer. Another thing that occurred to me after chatting with a number of my classmates and other graduating classes was that if a meteor streaked out of the sky and slammed into the dinner tent we were congregated in, half the international bankers of Canadian origin would perish. That and a corresponding number of dark blue suits.

I had worried that I might end up staring at a person as they were greeting me as a long lost friend (which I guess I was) and having zero recall of who this person was. Fortunately there were still some synaptic snaps left in my brain to put A and B together. I was able to navigate below the age lines, receding hair and expanding waistlines to positively identify all my classmates who made it. I am not sure if I have changed a great deal, besides the aforementioned physical changes everyone goes through, but there were some cryptic looks at me until a light seemed to go on in their minds. Maybe all my white hair just threw them or maybe it was because I am not the waifish 110 pounds that I once was.

Physical changes were not to only thing to have been affected over the years. My somewhat encyclopedic memory of music, books and other apparently worthless information has now taken on more of a thesaurus-like memory. No longer do the facts spill out in a constant stream of positive invectives. Now it seems I can’t quite lay my finger on the definitive facts, but more on the related, similar facts.

The other day I was sitting in a doctors’ office reading one of his current Time magazine issues from the late 1970’s and heard a song on the radio. Normally I would have known the song, the artist and at least some obscure fact. The tune was from a particular era of music that I didn’t really like. It wasn’t disco, but it wasn’t much better. It was of the big hair era of the early 1980’s. I recognized the song right away, “Hold Me Now” and remarked to myself that I hadn’t heard that song in a long time. Fortunately, I replied. “I wonder what ever happened to that band? And that band was….”. This is when the thesaurus and not the encyclopedia kicked in. My mind went through the most immediate of options, the band was sort of like Spandau Ballet… maybe more like Tears for Fears? a-ha, do you think? I looked over at my wife who was waiting with me and asked her if she remembered the name of the band who was singing that song. She looked at me in a way that only wives can and said, “We are in a doctors’ office… for matters regarding our health…. and you are wondering about the name of a band of a song you don’t really like?” She does have a way with succinctness.

Instead of dwelling on health matters, I wracked my brain trying to remember. I tried all of the mnemonic tricks that I could think of, well at least the ones I could remember. I visualized the band in my minds eye, hair sticking up about a mile from the top of their heads, the chorus kept running over and over again through my mind, but yet the name just wasn’t coming to me. It was only on our way home that it hit me. Out of nowhere, like a fog lifting, curtains parting, a bolt of lightning igniting the awareness in my cortex…. The Thompson Twins! Of course the Thompson Twins, how could I not remember them? They of really big hair, a trio named after the detectives Thomson and Thompson in the comic, “Adventures of Tintin”. It was only after I reveled in the satisfaction of finally remembering that I could settle into any sort of smugness. This trivia stuff can be hard work.

There really doesn’t seem to be a cure for this degradation of my memory, well there is, but that option is rather final and I have been trying to make death not a reasonable alternative. It hasn’t really affected my life in anyway, I mean it is not as though I have ever made a lot of money or had a career out of knowing stuff that most normal people don’t really commit a lot of time to. I guess perhaps I could look on the bright side of things, even though my memory has slipped from encyclopedic to thesaurus-like at least I haven’t reached the third grade primer… yet.