Losing It

  I have reached the point where I am forgetting so much, I don’t remember what I forgot. I just learned this from a zipper. Since someone who knows California apparently got a message to Rain Down This Drought Now, I’ve had to spend a lot of time in the shiny green Gore-tex raincoat I’ve had for about 15 years. For nearly a week, that green slicker went from my body to the bathtub and back on my body. Until the morning last week I put it on, pulled and, damn, the front zipper wouldn’t zip. Even when I went and got my glasses to thoroughly examine the situation. Even when I put a flashlight on it.  As the Karmapas like to say: Nothing happened.

This broke my heart. I have trusted that raincoat for years. It has flapped, zipped pockets and inside mesh pockets, a hood, knee length, water repellancy--everything you need to be singing in the rain. I didn’t want to replace it with today’s shoddy flimflam.  I didn't want to not have it anymore. But I didn’t want to get soaked wearing a raincoat that kept flopping open. So on the morning the downpours and high winds ceased for a second, I trotted the seven blocks to the Chinese tailor, hoping she had the magic to replace the zipper. Or at least know whether a shoemaker could.

I was so happy to see she did pretty much what I did: try to hook the bottom pieces together a few times, reach for her glasses and try again; put it under stronger light and try anew. Then she did something I did not do: she looked further up the zipper. Apparently she was able to remember an up and down zipper that wants to work both ends against the middle has two connectors. She found the top grip, the one with the pull, the one that has to click into two pieces at the bottom so it can glide to the top. It was up at the neck. “See,” she said brightly, zipping it down, “you put that into these two. Now fine.”

You would have thought I was Ms Holiday Spirit herself, standing there with a red face and a green coat. I had been a ditz in public. Here I thought these lapses were only happening in the privacy of my own life where I have been trying to control them.  I Google the line of lyric that haunts my head to find song titles I forget (spoiler alert: you can actually find the li li li li song there…). I use an old red leather pocket address book to get phone numbers I suddenly can’t remember, numbers I don’t remember I forgot to enter as Contacts on my iPhone. I take the kitchen timer with me anytime I have something on the stove, which, when I don't go to another room and forget about it too, has saved a few pots from burning to death.

I also make lists. Faithfully I write down what I must remember to do each day. Only now rather fatefully,  each day when I go out to do it, I do not remember I forgot to take my To Do list with me. And I do not even remember that. Some days when I come home, I’m even surprised to discover I actually made a list because nothing I was just so busy doing was on it.

At least only I knew that. Now others are finding out that I am losing it, which is like having your slip showing. Yesterday I didn’t remember I forgot to put a stamp on a holiday card. Actually, I am not sending greeting cards this year. On purpose I didn’t buy any. But I did have two left from last year, and the minute after I opened a very expensive card sent by a childhood friend, I dug one out. I absolutely had to send her one to prove I wasn’t totally over the edge because last month for the first time since we were kids, I missed her birthday. Entirely. I remembered that when her holiday card came. I had to do something. I wrote a lovely long message on my leftover card and sealed it up.

I gathered up her card with two bills I’d sealed the night before and went down the block to the post office, which has four mailboxes out in front. I was maybe 20 yards from the first of them when I noticed her card had no stamp on it. Another lapse! Immediately I turned around and starting walking home.  I’d gone maybe 10 yards when a voice popped up in my head: “Idiot! Why are you taking the stamped mail back? Just put those two in the mailbox and then go home.” This made me hesitate, stop, turn around, turn back around, take a step, turn around and walk back to the mailboxes where I dropped the two bills, making extra effort to cling for dear life to that unstamped card.

When I turned to walk home, I noticed a middle aged man nearby. He had watched my little backward forward ballet. He had a chary look on his face and a disbelieving pity in his eyes. He smiled knowingly before he walked the other way.

What I am getting for Christmas is dread. What I am getting is so out of sync with the season’s joy to the world, I want to convince myself I should just loose a hardy Ho Ho Ho at being so MIA. I should dismiss my failings with a big belly laugh and embrace ditzhood. It’s so… now. 

On the other hand, in this age when failure is not supposed to be an option, I could just fahgettaboutit. I could stop caring and worrying about being Mistaken in Action. I could just try to be more like our elected President  and all the people around him who don’t have to worry about their mistakes or even learn from them because they never acknowledge they make any. Ha ha.

It doesn’t help to remember my grandmother was 93 when she first completely forgot a phone number past all recall. It sent her into quite a tizzy.  “You have to help me!” she screamed, obviously able to remember my number. “You have to come here and do something. I’m senile now. I just went to call Gladys (her niece) and couldn’t remember her number. It’s happened to me. I’m senile. Do something!” 

At the time I was laughing so much I could barely get words out. “Nanny, calm down. Just calm down. You’re fine. Trust me. If you really were senile you wouldn’t know that. You wouldn’t know you forgot a phone number or even whose it was. You’re just fine.” Now I don’t see one bit of ho ho ho in there.

I definitely did not laugh last weekend when I couldn’t find my favorite little utility knife, the 3” serrated one with a black plastic handle. It has been my reach for snack slicer (fruits, cheeses, hard boiled eggs, pastries) for at least a decade and suddenly it was gone. It wasn’t on the knife rack, wasn’t in the sink, wasn’t in the plastic utensil bin of the metal drying rack on the counter. It wasn’t even on the floor under the stove or in the recycling bin. That’s how hard I searched. What kind of loony tune would break into my apartment, leave everything perfectly neat, not touch the computer and just take a 3” serrated knife? Really. That is what I thought. The world’s gone mad, and everybody’s looking for some attack weapon or other, so they took my little knife. 

How else to explain my knife as gone as a sock in a washing machine, as lost as America’s democracy, due diligence, dignity, decency, derring-do and downright honesty.

It really hurts not to reach what you always reach for. Not a good kind of emptiness. I’ve had to adjust to another new reality. Learn to make do in reduced circumstance. The old steak knife stuck in oblivion on the magnetic bar cuts apples, cheese and fig cake just fine, but I missed my favorite knife, like I miss living in a can-do country that can always cut it.

This morning I reached for the rubber spatula in my canister of cooking utensils and discovered I had two things in my grip: the long handled white spatula and my 3” serrated knife. There it was! Ms Ditz had somehow put it not in the usual and therefore wrong place where she didn't think to look.

Right there, I had to stop doing anything and everything. I had to sit down with a cup of tea. How worried should I be that I am really losing it? Of course I did remember I had that knife. I did remember I lost it and I did look for it in all the usual places. I did finally remember I forgot my friend's birthday. When my friend Joan’s mother was diagnosed with true dementia, the doctor told her a diagnosis of real dementia is made like this: did she just forget where she put the soup spoon or did she take the entire silverware tray and put it in the trunk of the car thinking that was the kitchen drawer.

You better believe I immediately ran to check the trunk of my car for the nail clippers missing three days now. Thank Buddha they were not there. Still, they are not in the medicine cabinet, not in any of my travel pouches, nowhere in the crannies behind the toilet on the bathroom floor. I got down and checked. They are nowhere to be found.  Honestly, I just cannot for the life of me imagine why a thief would break into my apartment, leave everything in tact, not even touch my computer or iPad and just take an old pair nail clippers. Has the world gone that mad or is it me?

~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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