This article in the Globe and Mail made me chuckle.
Today, it's the memory of keys
There's a lot of trivial information I remember.
But I cannot remember where I put my keys.
By TONY WILSON
Friday, March 30, 2001
Yesterday it was my wallet. On any given day it could be the cell phone, a treasured fountain pen, or my sunglasses. Visa bills on weekdays. Household tools needed for a crucial repair on weekends.
Today, it's the keys. They're gone.
At different times, I have blamed the nanny for moving them, the kids for playing with them, the neighbours for borrowing them and my wife for actually putting them where they're supposed to be. I have cursed the mythical key gnomes for hiding them, and would have screamed at the dog for burying them, if we had one.
But it's usually me who's to blame. And only me.
I have put something down and it has vanished into thin air. Or much worse, I have put it in a "safe place" so I won't lose it, but can't exactly remember where that place is.
"Where are the keys, dear?" politely asks my wife.
"Ahhhh. . ." I mumble with an air of desperation. "They're in a safe place," I say, implicitly acknowledging that the battle of the sexes has been resoundingly lost, along with the keys.
"A safe place" in my house is a dreaded oxymoron. It is neither safe nor a place. Like a creature of new-age Zen physics, the safe place defies all logic and reason by existing and not existing, at the same time and in the same place. The safe place occupies space and time but at different times and in different spaces, in something analogous to a twilight zone created especially for my keys. Quantum physicists, science fiction writers and Dancing Wu Li Masters would have no trouble finding the safe place using particle accelerators, yogic flying and The Force. But I cannot. My keys are in this parallel universe of un-being.
This morning, I put the keys "here" to be safe. But like Bill Clinton on the witness stand, it all depends on what you mean by "here." When I look here, the keys are not here. And they are not there either. So I spend an inordinate amount of time looking here and there: opening drawers, closing closets, checking pockets and even checking my left hand.
Fortunately, Zen reveals all: They are here and yet not here at the same time. They exist and yet they do not exist. They are in the "safe place."
You must believe me when I tell you I have an excellent memory. I can remember the smell of an old rail car from a trip across Canada I took as a six-year-old boy; the meals eaten at restaurants I visited in Europe when I was 12; the precise layout of the house I grew up in; the names of school friends I haven't seen in 35 years; places I have visited; times I have had; words spoken and heard in anger and joy.
But I suppose like Proust, I have remembered far too much of this sort of thing.
There's a lot of trivial information I have remembered that has no apparent purpose at all. For example, a fellow soccer Dad is regularly impressed that I can recite the Architect's Skit from Monty Python for a full minute during off-field socializing. A lawyer friend in Toronto, who's active in the Greek community, is astonished that I could remember that the fall of Constantinople happened May 29, 1453 (a Tuesday, by the way), signalling the end of the Eastern Roman Empire. And a woman I knew a lifetime ago is absolutely thrilled that I would remember her 40th birthday and send a card.
But I cannot remember where I put my keys.
My doctor has told me not to worry. I'm in middle age now, and in middle age, you've got to expect that your memory, your colon and your libido don't function nearly as well as they did when you were 25. He tells me I am forced to remember far too much in my professional life for my own good and little things like the keys just get crowded out. On his suggestion, I started taking ginkgo biloba only to find that it, like middle age, also effects the colon. Then I put the bottle in the safe place, and haven't seen it in weeks. Life's just not fair.
So I've started to imagine my failing memory as a hard drive in need of de-fragmentation. I suppose I should be deleting from my memory all that useless personal information to make room for the co-ordinates of my Visa bills, my wallet and my keys. I should purge from the corners of my mind all those old Python skits, know-it-all events from Roman history, and ancient birthdays.
The problem is, the body of useless information I've accumulated through the years has become an integral part of who I am. Deleting the trivia of my life so that there's more room to remember where the keys are makes me little more than a very reliable key hook. It does nothing for my well-deserved reputation as an entertaining soccer Dad, impressive Byzantine scholar and thoughtful old flame able to bring on a smile for the price of a stamp.
There's a scene in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey where Dave Bowman, the surviving astronaut, must shut down Hal, the wayward computer. "My mind is going," says Hal, ". . . I can feel it," as Dave turns the special keys that empty the computer's memory bank.
Given my memory lately, I've been identifying more with Hal. You see, Dave had his keys, and I still don't have mine.
But I think they're in a safe place.
Tony Wilson is a Vancouver lawyer and writer. We still don't know if he has found his keys yet
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"Or maybe he was a real quack who got sick and tired of pissing people off, and decided to get a life and masterbate for the next 10 years."
- Me to Antagonist on Red Quacker, 03/08/01 20:15
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