An old friend and I, catching up after a decade, were trying to think of a name. Memory failed. My friend, who is younger than I am, said he had started playing the age card.
I sometimes use age as an excuse. But the truth is that my memory has always been bad. I would forget to mow the grass when I was a boy, earning a scolding. I have always been like that.
It seems to me that memory plays tricks on people in different ways. I think some people simply don’t form a lot of them. Occasionally, a good writer will take note of that trait. You can find characters in the literature who are so focused on what’s happening now that they just don’t think about what happened two hours ago. Peter Taylor’s character Munsie was that way.
She could never be got to reminisce about her childhood in slavery, or her life with her husband, or even those halcyon days after the old Mizziz had died and Aunt Munsie’s word had become law in the Tolliver household. … But, as Crecie said, when a time was past in her mama’s life, it seemed to be gone and done with in her head, too.
I have known people like that. I’ve known people for whom regret seemed impossible. They didn’t live enough in the past to have strong feelings about anything.
Such people interest me, but I certainly don’t claim to be like that. I just have a bad memory.
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