Aging disgracefully: I’m not Forgetful, I’m in energy-saving mode
Getting older is a tricky thing.
All your parts are aging, and your warranty has expired. Even the after-warranty companies don’t want to have anything to do with you.
When someone asks me what I am doing in retirement, I answer, “I’m busy coordinating all my doctor appointments.
In reality, I spend most of my time trying to remember what I forgot.
Passwords have become a nightmare. You can let the website generate an unbreakable password, but it has a jumble of letters and symbols you could not remember. They offer to save that password in a secure location, but then I can never remember where it is.
And if I did find it, I couldn’t remember the password to get into my password. There is a limit to how many things I can remember, and it’s not very high.
When I do research for the St. Clair County Historical Society, I sometimes run across an old column of mine that I had forgotten I did. I tell myself I’m not getting dementia, I just can’t remember all the several thousand columns I wrote in my career.
I have always been bad at remembering things. That comes with my attention deficit disorder. But when do I cross the line into dementia?
When I am driving somewhere, and we use a route that usually takes us to the grocery store, or somewhere I often go, I end up in the grocery store parking lot. My brain often runs on autopilot so it steers me onto familiar paths.
None of it is serious, but it does remind me how scattered I am.
It took me two years after I retired to stop turning onto East Washington Street, moving over into the left lane and turning left into the newspaper parking lot.
Were you going to your parking spot, my wife would ask? No, I would lie. As if I could ever fool her.
To make a purchase recently I had to provide my address, my phone number and my pin number. Then for some unknown reason, they wanted the last four digits of my phone number. I didn’t point out that if they had the entire phone number, then should be able to get the last four by themselves. I was just glad they didn’t want the last four digits of my Social Security number.
All that for a five-dollar discount every few months.
I only worry a little. When I finally slip over the edge, I won’t know.
