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Forget About It! …
It appears to me that the main challenges of life as I journey through my 60s have been a slightly increased level of forgetfulness and a slightly decreased level of punctuality — and since I have always lived the life of the absent-minded professor, now I’m into dangerous territory.
Many times I’ve remembered a class only at the last minute or forgotten to grade a set of papers. When I taught at Tift College in Georgia in the 1960s, my students referred to me as “the late Dr. Fitzgerald.” I was not amused.
ROUNDABOUT AND ROUNDABOUT AND …
Barb loves the story of the time I forgot to get off a traffic circle. I was driving her and her parents on a trip, my mind off in space somewhere, when I got on one of those roundabouts so popular in Northern cities. As I made my first round, there was a woman driver trying to pull out from a gas station into the circle of traffic; and then I made a second round past her — still blissfully unfocused on the fact that I had to turn off at some point. By the time I drove past her the third time, the woman had rolled down her window to yell, “You stupid son of a b----.” I recall that Barb’s mother thought that was extremely funny.
These days, Barb and I both have posted notes stuck here and there all over the house, reminding us of things we want or need to do on any given day, appointments, things we mean to tell each other when we get a chance to sit down, or something we feel we better write down “while I’m thinking about it.” It’s never very useful to say to each other, “Remind me to … ,” because one of us is just as bad at remembering as the other.
Case in point: Back in May, our friend Vickie called to invite us to the birthday dinner she hosts each year for our good neighbor John. The following Monday would be John’s 89th birthday, and 10 friends were meeting at his house at 6:30 to wine and dine and celebrate. Barb was to bring the salad. She wrote it all down on her calendar, my calendar and a calendar hanging in the upstairs hall — the final authority on what we’ll be doing on any given day. She went out and bought John’s gift, wrapped it and left it in plain view on a living room desk.
OUR FRIENDS ARE SOOOO UNDERSTANDING
John’s birthday was a terribly busy day for us. Barb worked all day at the house, and I had a speech to give, classes to teach and a doctor’s appointment. By the time I got home around 6, we were both beat. “What do you want for dinner?” Barb asked. “Anything is fine,” I told her, “as long as it’s fast.”
So she whipped up a quick meal, and afterward we settled in to watch Jeopardy! Shortly before 8, the phone rang. It was Vickie. “Where are you?” she asked.
“Oh, good grief,” Barb said, both of us instantly flying around to get ready. Upon our 8:00 arrival for the 6:30 dinner, we had to tell John we had just flat-out forgotten his birthday. He took it well, even though there hadn’t been time to make the salad. The salad bowls sat on the table throughout the meal, with the other guests occasionally saying, “Would someone please pass the salad? I don’t recall eating mine, but it seems to be gone,” or “Delicious salad, Barb. Very light and, I’m sure, calorie-free.” A bunch of wiseguys.
All the guests, at least the ones in our age group and older, were very understanding, especially when Barb gave them her explanation as to why John’s special day in May had totally gotten away from her.
“I spent this whole day,” she told everyone quite truthfully, “taking down the Christmas tree.”
Randy Fitzgerald teaches modern American literature at Virginia Union University. He was a longtime public relations director at the University of Richmond and columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Contact him at
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