18. I'll Remember It in a Minute

We are all inclined to forget things. For instance, you might have searched for keys which are actually in one of your pockets: or mistaken old banknotes for rubbish and thrown them away. But is it possible for a person to forget even his own name? Corey Ford entertains us with the following story of how for get fid he seems to have become.

Let's see, what was I going to say? It was right on the tip of my tongue. Oh, yes, about my memory.

Frankly, I've got a mind like a steel sieve. Things go in one ear, but that's as far as they get. Right now if you asked me, for instance, I couldn't tell you where I'm meeting my wife for lunch. I can't recall the license of my car, I have to look up my own phone number in the book, and I haven't the slightest idea what this string around my finger is for. People are always coming up to me and saying, "I bet you don't know who I am," and, what's more, they're always right. I never remember names.

Maybe I don't concentrate properly when I'm introduced. I'm so busy trying to look the other person smack in the eye—some book I read, I forget the title, said the first impression is very important—that I don't catch his name when he gives it. I thrust out my jaw—that's what the book said—seize his hand in an iron grip, yank it toward me and downward at the same time and pronounce my own name in a forceful tone: "Ford." As a result, the name "Ford" is fixed firmly in my mind, and I can remember it the rest of the evening, but when I meet the other person again I call him "Hi-ya boy," or "Hi," for short. Most of the people I know are named "Hi-ya boy."

On the other hand, I always forget a face. That is, I recognize the face, but I can't place the person it belongs to. When I join a cocktail party I'll snub the host completely, stare coldly at an important business client with whom I had dinner last night, and make a bee-line across the room to pump the hand of an old college classmate whom I've been trying to avoid for years and who takes advantage of my enthusiastic greeting to borrow ten dollars.

The safest solution, I've found, is to nod to everyone I meet, creating the impression that I'm running for public office. If I see anybody waving in a crowd, I smile and wave in return. Usually it turns out that he is trying to attract the attention of someone standing behind me, which means that I must arrest my gesture in midair and pretend that I was just reaching up to scratch my ear, or that I was waving at someone behind him. The trouble is that the person behind him is apt to wave back.

It's even worse when I spot a familiar-looking face on the street. I halt and stare intently into a store window, occasionally glancing over my shoulder to see if the owner of the face is still there. Unfortunately, he spots me at the same time and halts before another store window casting furtive looks in my direction. Sooner or later our glances meet, and we greet each other pretending to be extremely surprised, exclaiming, "Well, what do you know!" and clapping each other on the back to cover the fact that we're both a little guilty about having failed to keep in touch all these years.

We start walking down the street together, assuring each other that we haven't changed a bit and asking how everything is and what's new lately, while I thumb frantically through the pages of memory's album in search of some revealing clue. Met him at Cape Cod last summer? Member of the club? Cousin Ettie's husband? "How's the wife?" I try, just a feeler.

"Oh, Myrtle's fine, thanks," he replies, dashing that hope.

I turn the corner; he turns it too. Can't I ever get rid of him? "Sure I'm not taking you out of your way?" I ask pointedly.

"Not a bit," he insists. "It's right in my direction."

By this time our conversation has dwindled to a few sporadic remarks like, "Hot enough for you?" or "How do you like the Giants?" and I wonder what I'll do if I meet somebody and have to introduce him. Played golf together once? Sells insurance? Friend of Bill's? "Ever hear from Bill?" I attempt.

"Bill who?" he counters, and we lapse into silence again.

I start down my own block, but he clings stubbornly to the last. I halt before my house in relief, and we shake hands. "Well, it's been great seeing you," I nod, starting up my path.

"We'll have to do it more often," he nods, and starts up the path of the house next door.

It's hard enough for me to remember a story I've heard, but it's even harder to remember where I heard it. Just as I'm halfway through a good one that somebody told me lately, I detect a certain glassy expression on my listener's face, which can be compared roughly to the sympathetic look you might give a doddering uncle who is well meaning but not quite bright. The further I get with the story, the more patient his smile becomes. Along about the time I reach the point, the horrid realization dawns that I told the same story to him yesterday. Not only that, but he's the one who told it to me the day before.

I have the same trouble when I try to buy a shirt. Somehow the figure "36" sticks in my mind, but I'm not sure whether it's my neck size or the waistband of my trousers. Probably the number is printed on the bottom of the shirt I'm wearing, but I'd look pretty silly pulling out my shirttail in front of a storeful of people. I point vaguely to the pile on the counter and tell the clerk, "That one seems about right," which accounts for the way my sleeves hang down around my wrists—and is why my collar looks so awkward.

I'm no good at all on birthdays or wedding anniversaries or dental appointments, but for some reason my wife never forgets a date. This isn't because women have better memories than men, I'm convinced, but because they forget different things. For instance, a woman can't recall where she put something, whereas a man knows right where he put it, but he can't think what it was he put there.

My wife has a strange ability in remembering something I said six years ago, which she brings up triumphantly at the appropriate moment during an argument. She has never forgotten that I admitted once I had a weakness for redheads, and she hasn't let me forget it either. She's able to tell exactly when Elsie's baby is due, she'll report the entire menu they served at the bridge-club luncheon, and she can quote word for word what that idiotic salesgirl said to her and what she told the salesgirl. On the other hand, when we start out of the house together she can never remember whether she left her cigarette burning.

It isn't that I don't retain. My mind is a veritable storehouse of assorted facts, like the names of all the living ex-Presidents, the declension of the Latin noun tuba (tuba, tubae, tubae or not tubae), or the first six verses of The Ancient Mariner. In short, I can re-member anything, provided it is useless. I can count up to ten in Navajo, border the state of Tennessee and order a fried egg in Malay (mata sapi, in case you think I'm kidding); but when I try to give a taxi driver the address of my insurance company in the city, I draw a total blank. I'd go back to my hotel room and look it up, but I've forgotten the address of the hotel.

I suppose the answer is to train your memory. This book I was reading—I wish I could tell you its name—claims that the best way to remember a name is to associate it with the name of something else. It seems to me this means you'd have two things to remember instead of one, but probably the author knows what he's talking about. All right. Let's say, for instance, that I meet a Mr. Garden, and I want to establish his name in my mind. A garden needs fertilizer, and fertilizer suggests a barn, and a barn usually has cows in it, and cows produce butter, and butter reminds me of that grease spot on my necktie. So, the next time I meet Mr. Garden, I glance at my necktie—I assume I'm still wearing the same necktie—run through the list backward, extend my hand, smile pleasantly and say, "How do you do, Mr. Fertilizer." It's as easy as that.

It's just as easy to remember telephone numbers. Suppose I want to think of Ocean 9-2561. The 9 is a baseball team, of course, and 2 and 5 are the respective ages of my wife's sister's two children, and 6 plus 1 makes 7, which is my hat size. So I can think of my wife's sister's two children playing baseball with my hat in the ocean, or else I can look up the number in the directory and save myself all the trouble. The main thing to realize is that the mind is a muscle which can be developed with proper exercise, according to this book on memory. It's funny I can't think of the title. I know it as well as I know my own name—

My name? That's easy. It's right here at the top of this article, if I could remember where I put the magazine.

From Has Anybody Seen Me Lately? by Corey Ford,

the Curtis Publishing Company, 1956.