Ann Fogarty

My slim, beautiful Pilates instructor walked into class the other day with a blank yellow Post-It note applied to her blouse.

“I have to call someone after class,” she explained. “And, lately, I need to do extra things to remember.”
In these 50- and 60-something years, remembering that we forget is often something that must stay in our minds just to help us through the day. My loss of memory runs the gamut from “Where the *$#!! is my purse?” to the “What are we having for dinner?” question I ask my increasingly-incredulous husband two to three times a day.

My friends and I often comfort ourselves with our slim veils of denial about our aging process. Some of the lies involve all the heavy, brain-compressing, profound thoughts we have to nobly carry in our heads each and every day. They squeeze out the unimportant stuff like missed appointments or why we entered a certain room to get a certain thing and then leave only to be haunted by our evanescent purpose.

And, of course, there’s all that stress, right? We are so much busier than our mothers or grandmothers were. They only had to worry about dust under the doilies, how to comfort a sick child, or the efforts involved in baking the perfect pie. I’d like to believe these things, but I liken them to the false-note compliments you get when the aging really sets in, like “You can’t be a day over 40, young lady,” or, “Your backside looks really slender in those form-hugging jeans.” Let me borrow a dainty phrase from Cher about this new change in our brain: “Aging sucks.”

My latest idea is simply to remember that I forget. From the obvious datebook entries to leaving myself a phone message to even placing a reminder in the sink at night so that in the morning I won’t blank out on something I have to do. It’s always on my mind that it isn’t always in my mind when I need it. Once I bought my father a keys-finder at a trendy gadget shop when he started to forget things. He was angry at this frustrating change in how his mind worked… and was also angry about the gift. So he gave it back to me and I used it for awhile, but forgot where I stored the box for it so I could put a new battery in. Now my husband and I do our dusty vaudeville routine “Where did you put the keys last?” on a regular basis.

My doctor gave me a “subtract by seven” test. Supposedly, if you can start at a high number and subtract it by seven several times, calculating the amount in your mind, you aren’t senile. Yet. I found the exercise cold comfort in two ways. It seemed too basic to detect dementia, and it was kind of hard to do after awhile.

I like my Pilates instructor’s method. Just grab a Post-It note, stick it somewhere on your body and move through the rest of your day with confidence. And there’s a side benefit: it will give you the illusion of youth. How long has it been since you had to wear a tag attached to your chest?