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A friend I've known since high school wrote me an email about reading and she said, "You taught me that reading is 'words, words, words'." Well, where did that come from? How? When? Why? Could I have said such a thing?
She wrote back: we were in high school working on the yearbook (I barely remember even this) and I asked you about reading and you quoted Hamlet, who said reading was just "words, words, words."
There is so much in this exchange that surprises me (that is, if I want to make a drama of it; otherwise I could just let it go). First, it turns out my friend has used that phrase all her life to tease and to make light of her own constant reading. And then there's the indisputable fact that I once knew something. How did I know this line from Hamlet and then I didn't know it at all? Memory is fickle, yes, but this particular memory seems to have left me as soon as I cited it to my friend at the age of 16. Apparently I gave it to her to keep track of. It's certainly true that I never spoke this (apt) line ever to anyone through the sixty years since I showed off to her.
I was obviously once a know-it-all. One blessed result of the memory loss, even the most recent, super-sized version of it, is that I have been forced to recognize how very little is left for me to be a know-it-all about. "Well, shut my mouth!" is pretty much where I am now.
You have nothing to fear. I no longer participate in oneupmanship. There's too little left in the brain to do that sort of one-upping, and what IS left is not necessarily accessible on demand. It's more like the wait-for-it moment that defines the conversation of (horrible word) seniors. What a dumb term. But what is better? Old fogies? Fossils? Wrinklies? How about, quite simply, us.
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