I Love to Tell The Story

Anyone know where I can pick up a few synapses?  I seem to have left mine at the store.

Last Friday, I took part in a lively conversation that was utterly void of people's names.  Four otherwise intelligent adults talking about things and people that we supposedly know a thing or two about.  And not one name.

"You ever have that one kid?" asked my friend, Brian.  "You know, he was, uh, kinda short, I think. . . . "

Twenty minutes later, we were laughing at our inability to tell a story--any story--that included a face and a name.  God help us when school revs up.

This morning, I saw a friend at the lake, recognizing her immediately and, after going through the alphabet for another 20 minutes, locating her name at the intersection of Normal and South streets.  Here's a little secret about me--if we run into each other and I've got a friend you don't know, I don't know you either (at least at that moment) if I don't introduce the two of you.    I think this is why my dad taught me to introduce myself frequently to others, to give them a chance to enjoy a synapse or two.

It's a strange thing when words evade us.  I suppose it's stranger still that we have words for all these people and things in our lives.  I mean, take "rhutabega," for instance.  Who thought of that?  But this inability to access my mental files is a disheartening development.  Sure, I laugh it off, for the most part.  But there's this residual tug that I can't quite ignore.

Heck.  I'm 50.  It's entirely possible that, from a literary point of view, I'm smack dab in my denouement, the downside of things.  I'm shorter than I used to be.  Wrinklier.  More forgetful.  I'd like to think that I still have a lot going for me--you ought to see me do the daily jumble!--but I'm afraid that whatever it is that is still going isn't all that interesting to anyone else.

I keep coming back to my dad, someone who was interesting to me every single day that I knew him.  He and I were in the same hospital when I gave birth to Eric.  My dad was there for prostate cancer.   When I heard that he hobbled down to my hospital floor the night that Eric was born,  I feared that someone who didn't know him would see only this old, sick man in an ill-fitting hospital gown, not the vital man who'd filled my life with laughter and stories.

I don't ever want to forget that story of my dad and Eric meeting for the first time.  I don't ever want to forget anything--even the ugly, hard stuff of life. 

I want to swim in the stories, to relish their plots.  I want to lay on my back in the cool grass and imagine each character, every detail of even the smallest of stories.  Stories are what make life come to life for me.  They make it real and unreal, believable and unfathomable, worthwhile and too much to take.

I don't like it, then, when names escape me, a plot slipping through my fingers.  I don't like those gaps at all.