A few days ago, I was sitting quietly in the living room. TV was off. No music was playing. Out here in the country (I was going to say the Ozark Mountains, but by Oregon mountain standards, these are just hills) it gets really quiet. My husband was outside turning on the sprinklers so that our newborn grass wouldn't turn yellow in this unseasonable heat. The dogs were in the backyard and for once they weren't barking or running or chasing anything. The only sound was the clothes dryer, and that was a soft, almost comforting sound back in the other end of the house. Almost inaudible.
I had picked up my MacBook and was about to write a note to a friend in Florida. I had FaceBook open (FaceBook and I have this like-hate relationship. Not LOVE-hate because on the best of days I don't LOVE it) and clicked on "Message" to send a note. I wanted to tell her hello, and share something meaningful because I usually just write short, unimportant stuff.
The dryer hummed on in the background.
My mind was semi-blank.
I closed my eyes and just tried to feel what I wanted to say but that didn't work because my mind began to fill up with a whole lot of nothing--and a bunch of jumbled up fragments of thought. It was like the days when my kids were little and they'd all talk at once. All four of them, all with different stories to tell.
I realized one thing. My brain does not work the way it used to. Of course this was not the first time I realized this. When it started happening about five years ago, I was 42. I didn't think about it much at the time because I was really going through a rough, stressful time. You're just on overload, I'd tell myself. Everyone has these problems when they have too much on their plate or in their life to cope. It'll pass. But it didn't. Pass, that is. It has gotten progressively worse.
And that, the worse part, is what brings me to this moment, sitting here in front of my computer, writing stuff down.
I've been able to read since I was 3 years old. I could write by 4 years old. I started writing little stories at about 5, before I started school. I still remember those stories. My grandpa McGhee (technically, my step-grandpa, because my "real" grandpa died in 1958, six years before I was born), who lived in the house next door with my grandma, used to bring me over to his house most mornings. My mom, who had just given birth to my younger sister (she was child six in our household, I was number five. I have four older siblings) didn't have much patience in dealing with my excessively inquisitive mind. But my grandparents did. Especially Grandpa Jack. John Frances McGhee was his name. Isn't that a wonderful name? Well, he would take my little hand, bring me into the house and into the fragrant-smelling kitchen where Grandma would inevitably be either cooking bacon or baking bread. Or pies. Or cookies. Or egg noodles. (The woman could COOK.) He'd give me a boost into one of those turquoise, plastic-formed chairs that looked like they'd been made by laying melty plastic over a giant egg. Then he'd get out the raggedy, old cigar box that was filled with about a hundred and fifty different sizes and shapes and colors of coloring crayons. With that twinkle in his eye, he'd whip out a few coloring books and let me take my pick of which one I wanted to color in.
All these memories are so crystalline-clear in my mind that I can still envision them as if they happened just yesterday.
Now, I don't know if it's still the same today, but back then, those coloring books all had a story of sorts that they would tell. At the bottom of each page was a sentence that the picture above would illustrate. All the pages together told a story, just like any other book. But, in order to color the picture, I had to read the words. Grandpa meticulously taught me the alphabet (which I got the first day, because he sang it to me), and then how to identify certain sounds that letter combinations made. It didn't take long. My mom didn't know I could read until after we left the Oregon coast to live in the mid-Willamette Valley. I was almost four when she heard me reading out loud from my sister's Life magazine.
So, all that to say that I've had a sharp-edged brain from earliest memory.
Until the past few years.
My grandma used to say that "Life is an orchard." I didn't know precisely what she meant, but I thought I got the gist of it. Sometimes the crop is really great. Plentiful, sweet, crisp. Then some years, blight strikes. Or a late freeze ruins the baby fruit. Or bugs get in and wreak havoc. It's a crapshoot. So, I used to wonder, is life a crapshoot, too? I didn't think so. Not then.
I had a type of self-confidence that allowed me to do just about anything I set my mind to. I never thought of failure. Never allowed the possibility of failing enter my thought process. And it was never a conscious effort, keeping failure out of the options column. I just never had it cross my mind that I might fail at any given task. I would set out to learn something new, not just believing I could do it, but knowing I could.
And now, in the past five years, that knowing seems to be faltering. Is it just me getting older? Am I suffering from some malady that I don't know about yet? Or is it a case of recognizing the arrogance in that youthful immortality and discovering that I don't know everything, after all? I'm not sure. But there are days when I remember some past event and time and I feel the sting of embarrassment rising in my face and in my mind. Could I have ever been that cocky and sure? Because in the past few months, I second guess so much that I'm becoming confused about even the simplest of things.
Oh, my mental acuity is still there, the nuts and bolts of it. I can still read/write, still have no problem doing math or other scholarly things. It's remembering the little things that is getting hard. A phone number that I memorized one day, repeating it again and again, is lost by the next morning. And not only is the number gone, but the reason I was memorizing it in the first place...that's gone too. Oh, I can remember that I memorized it. But not what "it" is or why. It freaks me out a little.
Maybe a lot.
So I thought, maybe, if I write stuff down, it'll get better. I used to write just about everything in my journal. My thoughts, feelings and emotions...what I wanted to do, why I wanted to do it. My hopes and dreams of the future. Everything.
I used to have a lot of dreams. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I'd start dreaming. And I could remember my dreams, even the next day upon awakening. They told big stories that would make a 2-hour movie look short. I wrote books based on my dreams.
Now I still dream, but they seem very fragmented. Bits and pieces of a whole bunch of nothing. Nothing seems to be connected. Nothing seems to make sense or tell any stories. And these dreams, they're not the good, happy dreams I used to have. In these, there is chaos. And they're not based around me or my family, my husband or my friends. These have complete strangers in them, they're from locations all over the world and things are often gray. Or red with blood. Or broken glass. Broken concrete blocks and wrecked cars and fires. People crying and wandering in a daze, suffering great loss. The smell of plastic burning, or of gasoline-fed fires has become commonplace in my dreams.
So...is that what's causing this seeming dis-connect? This inability to experience everything in my life throughout each day is frustrating to me. It's like looking through a dirty glass window sometimes, where my life is playing out and I am only partly aware of it. Trying to remember small things, conversations I've had, items I've put away, etc., seems all but impossible sometimes.
The worst of it, though, is the memories of my life from age 12 or so to about 42. Not that those years were bad--they weren't. They were, for the most part, very good. Or at least I thought they were. But the arrogance in my know-it-all mind back then just really embarrasses me now. It was, however, easier to get out of bed and face the day when I saw things through the lens of self-assuredness.
So now, I'd like to get some of my confidence back, only I'm not sure that it would be a good thing on all levels. The humility that I'm crawling around in right now...I think it's a good thing in some ways. But I'm not sure.
See? I am not sure. Ten years ago, I'd have never had that thought. I'd have KNOWN with certainty.
Now what?
