I am beginning to think I am like an old computer. You know the one. It has the baby pictures of your college student on it, and never was quite the same after you spilled coffee on it and dropped it on the concrete floor at the airport. Once you get over the shock of the cost of a new one, there is an easy solution. You just put all the stuff you want to keep on a memory stick, and start over on a brand new model with all the upgrades.
However, there is no memory stick for me. The phrase ‘senior moment’ has become commonplace, but I am here to make an objection to that widely used idiom. Of course, my ten-year-old granddaughter remembers her phone number with ease. She has had only one. I, on the other hand, have to sort through decades of files with hundreds of accumulated phone numbers to come up with the one I currently use. It is not a senior moment, it is merely a filing moment.
I think of the 19-year-old coming back from Iraq. When he says ‘the war’ he and you know what he is talking about. However, if you had said ‘the war’ to my grandfather he would have had to ask whether you meant World War I, World War II or Korea.
We older people have decades and decades of memories, mental pictures, facts, beliefs, events and occasions behind us. We cannot unload the extraneous onto a memory stick and clean up what is in all those files. They are there and there they will remain. And we cannot be upgraded. If I stumble over the name of the current president, remember that I have known 12 presidents in my lifetime and many more elections than that. I have seen my babies have babies and may be around for those babies to have babies of their own. After decades it all begins to blur.
We need to stop apologizing for those moments when we are frantically opening and shutting mental filing drawers or sifting through mental computer files to come up with the name of that person we knew in third grade. We will get there, or not, but it is not a question of being old. It is simply a matter of finding the right file.