Yes,
sadly, many of us are becoming senile.
I’m
of the opinion that senility does not ring your doorbell and announce itself
thusly: “Hi, I’m senility. I’ll be
hanging out with you and making your life miserable in increasing degrees until
you’re dead.” No, I think senility is
much more subtle.
I’ll
catch a glimpse of senility out the corner of my eye as I walk into a room and
forget what I went in for. Occasionally
it’ll be accompanied by faint, maniacal laughter. Senility likes to play like that.
And
I don’t even want to talk about how I can still remember my locker combination
from high school and the lyrics to “American Pie”, but couldn’t tell you the
color of the shirt I wore yesterday if there was $20 riding on it.
But,
I refuse to surrender my short-term memory without a fight, so I’ve come up
with the following tactics to confuse my brain into thinking it’s winning:
Post-It notes
As
I look around I see a good dozen or so, to remind me to take my medicine, and
get the oil changed, and not leave the house until I’ve put pants on. Others are for important dates, and lottery
numbers that came to me in dreams, and my Netflix password.
Cell phone alerts
There
are six daily and two weekly alerts, and they help me keep on top of
things. Important things, like to check
my rear-view mirror before I back out of the driveway, and to make sure the
oven is turned off, and to look at the Post-It Notes.
Ginkgo biloba
Okay,
I don’t actually take this stuff, but I’ve read up on it.
Memory exercises
There
are about 40 million of them on the internet and I’ve come to the same
conclusion about all of them: They’re crap.And I know there were at least a couple more. Hmmm. Hang on, it’s coming to me. Something about… I’m pretty sure it starts with an “r”. No, wait, it wasn’t an “r”, it was… Okay, it rhymes with… no, wait…
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