Have I Said This Before?

My daughter the V-meister has a fantastic memory. She recalls a lot of very specific things that happened a long time ago and which I frankly sometimes wish she’d just as soon forget.

“Hey, Mama. Remember when I was two and you forgot to buckle me into my car seat?”

“No.”

“Or how about that time we got stopped by a police officer and you said, ‘CRAP ON A CRAP CRACKER’!”

She has always been a whiz at facts and figures, able to quickly summon very specific information as though retrieving it from some kind of file cabinet. (Her brain?) Verily, she sometimes even speaks of the “folders of her mind.”

One thing I know for a fact is that my mind has no folders. Maybe it did once, but now it’s more of a desk with towering piles of papers on top of it. Often I have a vague hunch that something I need is somewhere near the bottom of one of those piles, but damned if I have any idea how to go about retrieving it.

And this issue is not just limited to ancient memories. You put a child, a pet, and a husband in front of me, and I’ll go through each one of their names before scoring on the third try. I never understood this when my mom or grandmother did it, but now it’s perfectly clear that people should simply be numbered. Also, I’ll tell you the same story three, four or seven times with absolutely no recollection of ever uttering a word of it,  and just today I forgot where I was going on my way to pick the V-meister up from school.

(There are more things I wanted to say in this blog post, but I forgot)