Published: June 22, 2008 08:20 am      

Sorry, but I seem to be having an MEMFE

A fellow I’ve worked with for 39 years walked past the table where I was sitting, and I said, “Hi, Pat.”

He said, “Hi ...,” then grinned and began to laugh.

“I can’t think of your name.” he said.

“That’s all right,” I told him, “because you’re not Pat.”

Now, doesn’t that make you feel better about yourself?

If it has a name, I may have a problem with it. Doesn’t matter if it walks on two legs or four, or if it’s a restaurant or golf course. This doesn’t worry me, because many of my friends are the same way. We believe anyone over the age of 50 should have to wear a name tag.

Our unspoken agreement is, “If I am talking to someone you don’t know and don’t introduce you, it’s because I don’t remember his name. Or, I may have forgotten yours.”

What’s just as bad is seeing somebody we’re used to seeing somewhere else, and then it’s a case of “Who is that, and where do I know him from?”

Some of us were talking about a recent movie that featured a Depression-era race horse most folks thought should have been pulling a plow, but who wound up running the legs off every thoroughbred around.

Four legs, can’t remember the name. All of us were stumped and came up with everything from Flicka to Dan Patch and Man O’War, but not the right one. (I might add that I was the only one who remembered that Gene Autry’s horse was named Champion and that Upset was the only horse to beat Man O’War — whose jockey had him turned around and was caught by surprise when the start was called; there were no starting gates in those days.)

Finally, we found a fellow who remembered the horse’s name was Seabiscuit. He likes to go to the track, which probably helped.

Recently, I saw an old friend and promptly called him by the wrong name. Another of my friends laughed and said, “Another senior moment!” which I didn’t mind, because he’s no better off than I am in this regard. A few weeks back, he told me he liked my column the previous Sunday, but had no idea what it was about. By then, neither did I. You’d be surprised how often I have this conversation with folks. It’s entirely possible that by the time you read this column, I won’t remember it.

Some of my classmates and I met recently for our monthly dinner, and each of us had a story to tell about a senior moment we’d experienced since our last meeting. What mine was, I don’t recall.

One lady gets a big charge out of telling stories on herself. It may be that she does so because we will respond by talking about dumbness we’ve committed, and this reassures her that she isn’t losing her mind any faster than the rest of us are.

This lady once pointed the electronic car key at her front door and kept pushing the button until her husband said, with all the gentleness he could muster, “Honey, that ain’t a-goin’ to work.” (I told her I’d tried my key on the garage door and didn’t have any more success than she did.)

Most recently, she was in her living room talking on the cell phone she had in one hand while holding the remote control to the television in the other.

“When I finished talking on the cell phone,” she said, “I turned the TV off.” Her husband nodded and said, “Yep.”

I’ve now heard of other folks doing the same. Something this extraordinary deserves more than just to be called a “senior moment.”

After all, we’ve fancified just about everything else in our society under a process I like to call “trying to turn a piece of horse manure into a golf ball by painting Titleist on it.”

Banks have evolved into “lending institutions,” prisons are “correctional institutions” and jails are “detention centers.” Scenery is a “viewshed” and soldiers are “war fighters” (their ideal function, particularly for those stationed along the 38th parallel in Korea, is really that of “war preventers”).

Raising a child is “parenting,” potty-training a child is “toileting” and correcting a a miscreant child by swatting his (part that goes over the fence last) only one time is considered in some circles to be “child abuse.”

Rain is a “rain event,” snow is a “snow event,” and a crisis is a “crisis situation.” Someone who assists someone else or does something for him is an “enabler,” a “facilitator” or a “provider.”

People who do a significant part of the same jobs that are performed by other people, but who have less training and less certification and therefore don’t make as much money, are “paraprofessionals.” (Time was, I’d have said a paraprofessional was a war fighter who jumps out of a perfectly good airplane.)

There’s a commonly used term that refers to vaporlock of the mind, but despite its colorful nature, “brain ****s” is a bit on the generic side. I suggest we upgrade it for describing our more notable senior moments by referring to them “Maturity-Enabled Mental Flatulence Events.” MEMFE for short.

After I got home from dinner with my classmates, one of them phoned me and said, “It just dawned on me that my wife and I forgot to tell you good-night, and I felt bad about that.”

Funny you should say that, I said. Guess what I was just thinking ... .