Recently, I had an embarrassing episode at a local gas station when I gave the attendant my BP card instead of my Shell card. You’d think that the pictures on the cards would help to differentiate them. I mean, I only have two. My BP card is white, and has a bright green and yellow sunburst on it. My Shell card is blue, with a big yellow seashell on it. Duh. But these days even company logos don’t get my attention, apparently.
As I get older, I do embarrassing things like that all the time. What’s worse, most of the time I don’t even realize that I’m doing it until someone lets me know. If I’d been my normal witty self, when the attendant pointed out that I had handed him the wrong card, I’d have responded, “Oh yeah? Well your gas pump has the wrong number on it. Instead of $1.21/gallon, it says $3.21.” Don’t you hate when you think of the perfect response when it’s too late to use it?
In addition to handing people the wrong item, I also say the wrong word quite often. Like the time I told my daughter we’d have to go to the mall to buy some more “This End Up” bras instead of “Limited Too” bras. (In case you don’t know, This End Up is a crate furniture store, and Limited Too is a pre-teen clothing store.)
Usually the incorrect word I use either starts with the same letter or rhymes with the word I’m looking for, as if the sorting process in my head got halted just one synapse away from the mark. Just today I was babysitting a friend’s son, and I pulled a Sesame puppet out of the toy cabinet and said, “Look, here’s Ernie!” And he looked at me perplexed and said, “Uh, Elmo?”
When I have these “menopausal moments,” people eventually figure out what I mean, and correct me. Even three year olds, as in the above example. But when I’m not saying the wrong word, sometimes I’m not saying anything, which is much worse. I just come to a dead stop, right in the middle of a sentence, and nothing comes out. My Dad used to do that all the time when I was a kid and it drove me crazy. What was he thinking about? Where did his mind go? You’d think now that I’m doing it myself, I’d at long last have the answers to those questions. But the truth is, I have no idea. The best explanation seems to be the current expression, “Out to lunch.” Or as my friend Bill says, “The lights are on, but nobody’s home.”
It’s like my brain just freezes, as if it’s playing the “statue” game that we used to play as kids. The one where everyone is running around wildly and someone yells, “statue” and everyone freezes until the person who is “it” releases them.
Not only do I have no idea why my brain freezes, but I also don’t know why it starts up again. Which makes me wonder if one day, it will just not start up again and that will be it. I’ll be an instant catatonic, frozen for the rest of my life.
What I can’t figure out about this memory stuff, is that even though I can’t hold in my head for twenty seconds whether my husband just asked me to make him coffee or tea, I can remember the weirdest stuff from grammar school. Like the poem,
The owl and the pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat.
They took some honey,
And plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
Or how to sing the French national anthem (in French).
If anyone has a good explanation of why this happens, or better still, what to do about it (some magic thawing potion, perhaps?), please contact me and let me know. Meanwhile, I’m out to lunch.