OCTOBER 24, 2019 – Yesterday I went to the doctor for my flu/pneumonia shots and annual physical. Because I’m now 65, the sign-in questionnaire was quite different from the form used on younger adults. The “old folks” form includes such questions as, “How many times did you fall last year?” with a choice between “0-1” and “2 or more.” Whoever framed the response ranges wasn’t from Minnesota. Here, “> 20” would be closer to what many people experienced last winter.
A word quiz to test my short-term memory was to lead the actual exam. The nurse gave me fair warning, which was good, because it gave me a brief moment to coach myself.
“Pay attention!” I told me. “Remember—haha!—what I always tell you: half of remembering is paying attention; the other half is making quick associations. If you’re told 10 words, group them in threes with one loner; think of a four-person rowing crew—three with oars plus the coxswain; assign a word to each hand and forehead of each rower; to the coxswain, just the forehead . . .”
“I’m going to say three words,” said the nurse, “and then I’m going to ask you to repeat them—right after I say them and a few minutes from now. Ready?”
“Three?!” I said.
“Yes, three,” she said.
I immediately abandoned the crew team. “Yeah, okay, I’m ready,” I said, all ears.
“Leader, season, table.”
Before the third word had tumbled fully out of the nurse’s mouth, my brain snapped a picture of those three nouns as they instantaneously formed an image of:
- My son Byron as a little boy answering, “Leader,” to my question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (see my 10/6/19 post) posed while we walked down our drive at the Red Cabin (where that conversation had actually occurred);
- Red maples on either side of our drive—representing the current season;
- The picnic table that is on our screened porch, where a person would have a commanding view of the first two words.
In the next instant, I repeated the three words—and again, in rapid fire, when asked a few minutes later.
“Good!” the nurse said. “You passed with flying colors!” She had no idea that my “snapshot” had captured bright red maple leaves flying in the wind.
As I waited for the doctor to appear, I joked with my personal memory coach about what could have been on the test. “For example,” I said, “Did Trump’s July 25 exchange with Zelensky take the form of a letter or a phone call?”
Then I wondered . . .
A year from now, how much will we remember of the Zelensky phone call? Or will Orwell lead us to say, “Oh, well, it was a perfect letter, wasn’t it?”
If that day comes, I imagine us of the resistance meeting in a safe-house deep in the woods, where the code words will be . . . leader, season, table.
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
