Fill in the Blanks

“I was watching this movie last night that was really good.”

“What’s it’s called?”

“Ummm,” long pause, “I think it has the word forever in it.”

“Hmmm, ‘Forever Young?’”

“That’s it!”

Sound familiar?

“The movie starred what’s his name and, um, Jamie Lee Curtis.” A snap of the fingers shows how very proud you are that you remembered at least one name.

And so it goes.

I had lunch the other day with three other women and we literally had to finish each other’s sentences because nobody, not one of us, was able to remember a whole thought. Whether it was the name of a celebrity, a restaurant we liked, the name of a street, it didn’t matter. We were simply incapable of speaking a full sentence. It was like taking a test where you had to fill in the blanks. Or as if we were playing Charades, for goodness sake!

The thing is, I already do so much to keep my mind sharp. I read, I write, I play tons of games, I socialize frequently, but things just disappear from my mind. If it’s a celebrity, I can see the face, the body, I can potentially conjure up other movies he or she starred in (that’s questionable, but sometimes I can), yet the person’s name will elude me.

So welcome to my world and I know for fact a good many of you are already in it.

There’s only one thing we can do about it and that’s laugh.

You just gotta laugh.