My sister calls up to tell me about something interesting she'd heard on the radio.
"Goody," I say, settling into a deep chair for one of our lovely, long phone-kuiers. "
Fire away."
"Ja," she says, "so..." And then she stops. "Um... it's uhm... bloody hell, it's gone! Can you fricken believe it! It was... it was something I didn't know, but when I heard it, I just knew you'd like to know. It was something interesting, right up your alley." "King Charles is a cross-dresser? Cyril the Shocked has discovered his spine?"
"No man, now it's gone completely."
"Never mind," I say philosophically, "you actually just phoned to tell me about something you never knew, but thought I should know. And now you don't know anymore. Full circle. Now I also know there's something you never knew. And neither do I. So we're square, or what?"
We both laugh, but with a tinge of unease. It's because we're getting on. We spend more and more time searching for stuff: our specs or the blasted phone, or its charger. Actually, we should be winding down, not up. But we're forever losing things - car keys, remotes. And words. Especially words. Sometimes they just won't come.
Never mind reaching the tip of our tongues, they don't even pass our tonsils. Somewhere along the neural corridors between lip and brain they run aground. Maybe they never left our brains in the first place, got dropped at the shaky handover between our elderly synapses. Lately, our conversations have become rather moth-eaten, sporting big holes like last winter's old coats.
Where have all the good words gone, we wonder?
Words like ‘pentameter' and ‘sanctimony'. These days, even the humble ones, like ‘kennel' and ‘convert', seem to be packing their bags, singing "so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodnight".
Luckily for us, my sister and I still manage to fill each other's gaps. When I say "you know, that fat old tenor, long dead", she knows it's Pavarotti. And when she forgets the word for boerewors and comes up with "those long strings of mince, you know mos, man", I don't even ask.
Neither do we show incomprehension when a sentence dries up midway, succumbs to a mumbling of "so-on and so-forth, whatever." We endure. L
ately, more scrappy words like ‘whatchamacallit' and ‘thingamajig' have shown up in our speech, nestling in like family overstaying their welcome. In their dull, dreary clothes they have little to offer but doggedly fill the empty seats left by their more dazzling counterparts.
These guys, like fair-weather skelms, will skedaddle at crucial moments. You're in a school committee meeting, for instance, and need a very ordinary ‘curriculum'. But it has left the building, along with ‘syllabus' and even the less suitable ‘module' and ‘schedule'. You're left high and dry with ‘whatsit' and ‘dingus'. The point you were making turns to dust.
On the other hand, my sister advances, forgetfulness may actually be a good thing - as in a necessary function of the brain. Scientists claim it's our natural way of sweeping away all the rubbish we accumulate in there. Like, do you really need to recall all of the Kardashians?
On the downside, with age the sweepers may go into overdrive. Comes the day that you lose ‘Covid' and are left stranded with ‘big flu'. Or ‘Limpopo' and ‘Twitter' ride off into the sunset.But there are other ways to remember, aren't there? You might forget the name of a favourite flower.
But the nose saves the day, it retains a childhood memory of your Mom at her dressing table, dabbing a drop of Blue Violet behind each ear.
Perhaps the specifics no longer matter, it is the memory that counts. Somewhere, in that fuzzy place between forgetting and remembering, memory lingers to feed the soul. In the meantime, we fight back against the decay. We keep the grey matter fit with Wordle or chess or learning Spanish. My sister and I have devised our own games.
We quiz each other on fun facts such as the names of the wives of all four Beatles, or all of the nine provinces.
Or was that 11?
Oh, never mind, as long as we can laugh. A lot. At each other and at ourselves. And when we forget what it's all about, we just fill in the blanks with "so on, etcetera, what-have-you, whatnot".
And so forth. And whatchamacallit, whatever. Blah.
