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Along Life’s Way
Forgetfulness
By Lois E. Wilson
Memory at times can be fleeting. Several have written we are more
likely to remember the bad things in our lives and forget the good.
Therefore, bad events become baggage.
I remember an old joke wherein a pastor visiting a church member’s home
asks, “Do you ever consider the hereafter?” The woman replies, “Yes of
course I do—almost every day. I’ll go into the bedroom, the kitchen,
any room and think: “What am I here after?”
Often when we meet someone from our past, we search our memory to try
and come up with their name. We try to place them in an environment
where we think we knew them.
When we moved to Greenville thirty years ago, many people greeted me as if they knew me. I thought the town was quite friendly.
I solved the mystery when one man called me “Phyllis.” He said we had
gone to school together. Perplexed, I questioned him further and
discovered he thought I was the town’s beloved Phyllis Mong. After
Phyllis and I became friends, we laughed about the mix-up. I promised
her I would try to never say or do anything to besmirch her reputation.
Recently while recuperating for two months, I was away from home and
all the appliances I normally interacted with every day. I found that
it took me three tries to enter the correct password to gain access to
my computer.
I decided to do the laundry. To prevent accidents from water damage, I
often turn off the hot and cold water valves. So when I attempted to
start the washer, at first check, I couldn’t remember if the valves
were on or off. I did a test and taught myself again their “on”
positions.
I had a few missteps with controlling the microwave. In the car I
forgot how to set its clock, select and lock in favorite radio
channels, and change the angles of the mirrors. I also forgot where I
had put items for convenience or safety.
Samuel Johnson states in The Idler: “It would add much to human
happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the
remembrance is at once useless and afflictive…that the mind might
perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer
encroach upon the present.” His comment has some merit. However, I hope
he would not have been an advocate for destroying the statues of our
forefathers and history of the past. He’d be gone too!
Now that I’ve returned home, I confront memory challenges each day.
This is my observation: I didn’t know I knew so many things and people
to forget. What was your name again?
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