"Try to remember that time in September," goes one of my favorite songs from the classic musical "The Fantasticks." But I've forgotten the rest of the words.
That's not entirely true, but it might as well be. I've become preternaturally aware of all the things I'm having trouble recalling instantly. Having unduly prided myself on a good memory, I'm now paying a steep price for my fall from the height of that particular immodesty.
Hauling out information from the stockroom of my brain or bringing it up from the basement of my personal history has become frustrating. Instead of doing it with the snap of my fingers, I have to push a button so that the freight elevator gets to the correct floor and then I have to hunt around the shelves, the boxes and the files until I find it.
It usually goes something like this: My husband and I want to return to a restaurant in New York where friends had a lovely anniversary party four or five years ago.
The trouble starts here: The phrase "four or five years ago" is meaningless.
It could have been two years ago or 10 years ago. Spans of time, like the waistlines on my pants, have become increasingly elastic through the years.
But Michael and I want to go back to this restaurant, OK. So we start taunting each other. "C'mon, you can find it in your notebooks. You write everything down," he says.
"I can't search through 10 years of diaries looking for a restaurant we went to on a date I can't recall," is my reasonable reply.
Michael will counter saying he can narrow it down: "It was French. Or Spanish. Not Italian. Maybe Portuguese. It was on the East Side, and there was an excellent parking garage around the corner." My husband's ability to remember dates, people and events is tied to vehicular detail. He remembers the year we met because of the car he was driving at the time.
We both remember the shrimp appetizer was amazing but even with the aid of Zagat's that doesn't help. We consider writing to the couple who threw the party but decide that since we're not inviting them to join us on this occasion-celebrating with other friends-it's far too tacky.
We choose another venue and everything is lovely. But we're still annoyed at not being able to remember the name of the Place With The Shrimp, which has become the lost shrine to seafood.
My most recent memory lapse incident was a more public one. Two weeks ago (and that date I know for a fact), I was teaching a graduate seminar on nonfiction creative writing. It's a startlingly good group this year, a mix of returning teachers, solid Ph.D. candidates and brand-new students. One essay worked particularly well, building from a few striking images until it finally had one overwhelming moment that eclipsed them all. All members of the course offer their editorial comments before
I do. When I spoke, I said the effect of the piece was like-and then I paused.
"It's when, in that movie where the mother ship appears over the horizon, you realize all the other UFOs were just scouting the territory "
I realized the students were staring at me with their heads tilted and their eyes blinking.
"You know, the movie"-I could no more remember the title than I could remember the name of the restaurant in New York-"the one where Richard Dreyfuss sculpts the mashed potatoes into a tower."
Now they just looked sad, baffled and maybe scared. They had no idea what I was talking about.
"Do you mean 'Close Encounters?'" asked one young man, finally.
No besieged heroine from a silent movie ever felt more rescued than I did at that moment. Yes, that's the movie I meant. No, they had not seen it. Even the student who knew the name hadn't watched anything but clips. Yes, they admitted, they thought I'd left the building as I spoke about Richard Dreyfuss and potatoes and were wondering how to handle the crisis.
We laughed with a genuine sense of relief. And I'm going to remember that story for, oh, at least six or seven years.