One of the things about aging that scares me is that I will lose my mind the way my mother lost hers, becoming entirely delusional and thinking that it is the rest of the world that is crazy. The day I wrote the material below (April 7, 2021) was one of those scary days. However, it turned out there was nothing wrong with my memory at all. Instead I had stuffed my drawer so full that several shirts, including the one that I was looking for had fallen down behind the drawers and then under the bottom drawer. My husband figured it out and rescued my missing shirts, and I calmed down. It is useful for me to remember this, so that I don't panic the next time something goes missing.
Yesterday was a difficult day. Early in the morning, I went to my dresser and pulled open the drawer with all my graphic t-shirts to get the newest art tee that I had purchased last week. It wasn't there. I pulled everything out of the drawer and it wasn't there. I looked in every other drawer in the bedroom and in the closet just in case I had hung it up. I searched all the laundry baskets, and went through the trash. I l looked on the shelves with the towels and in the containers where the sheets are stored. No art tee.
Next I completely tore apart my office, moving boxes and books, checking the drawers where art supplies, tools, and medical supplies are kept. I looked in the sewing box and the art project box and the bag of knitting. Then it was on the kitchen, where I checked cabinets and drawers and shelves, trash beens and garbage. I went outside and pulled bags from the trash cans and searched them. In the living room I shifted through all the blankets and pillows and baskets where things are stored.
Then I involved my husband, and we checked his study and his closets, his laundry baskets, his drawers. He went with me and we went back again over the bedroom and all the dressers, pulled clothing out of all of them, both mine and his, unfolding and refolding every black t-shirt, to make sure it wasn't the missing one.
At the very beginning when I first opened the drawer to get the tee, I had been certain that it would be there. As the day went along, I became less and less certain. I could remember the box arriving and opening it. I could remember getting the shirt out and showing it to my husband. He could remember me showing it to him. But now I was no longer certain that I actually could remember taking it in the bedroom and putting it in the drawer.
Every few hours throughout the rest of the day, I would go through the search process again. There was no sign of the tee anywhere. It caused me to think that I had done something irrational like put it in the garbage. Even on the very rare occasions that I throw away any clothing, I always put it in the trash cans, not in the garbage - i.e., food waste and used cat litter. But since the shirt had vanished and I had searched the trash both inside the house and in the outdoor cans, I began to think that some how I had walked into the kitchen and thrown a brand new t-shirt in with the wet, smelly and disgusting garbage. This was so out of character that it was disturbing.
But then a lot of disturbing things have been happening with my memory in the last few years. I have always had a poor memory. When I was in the first grade, my teacher Mrs. Davis, repeatedly told me, and not in a kind or kidding way, that "Sue Greer, if your head wasn't screwed on tight you'd forget that too." I was an absent-minded and disorganized child, but I wanted to do well in school and I was disciplined so I taught myself a whole host of tricks and techniques to remember and keep track of things. I lived by lists even when I was seven years old. As a college freshman I immediately realized that without a system I would always be looking for my keys and my id (essential if one wanted to eat). So from the time I was 18 I always had a clearly specified place for keys and other essentials, and always made sure that I left things in that place. To this day I do not misplace my keys because they belong in one place and always go in that place.
Growing older is not for the timid, it is a scary country!
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