On the bright side

One nice thing about facing 50 is that I now have an excuse for many of my failures, flaws, and disabilities. For example, I have this weird thing about numbers. I can't remember them. Keith was quite hurt when, several months into our relationship, he discovered I didn't know his phone number. Until I explained I didn't know mine, either. I carry it around on a little slip of paper in my wallet. My phone number, my address, my license number, the cell phone numbers of my kids and husband, let alone the phone numbers of friends and relatives--they slip and slide and blend into each other. The most embarrassing is the fact that frequently I cannot remember my children's birthdates. It's a problem when you're standing at the doctor's receptionist's desk and she spits out in her computer-like voice: "Child's date of birth?" and you stammer, "Umm, June. June 20----um, 28, no 27, right June 27." And she glares at you and says, "Year?" And you panic and blurt out, "Uh, 1990!" And she taps away, looks up suspiciously, and says, "Our records show he was born in 1991." And you have to admit, "Right. You're right. That's it. 1991." And then you wait for Social Services to appear at your door.

But now I can just blame my number thing on old age. Menopause. Hormones, ya know. Mention hormones and half the human race looks around wildly, shuffles his/their feet, and says, "OK. Gotcha. No problem."

In addition to the numbers thing, I'm also really bad at, well, common day-by-day observation. I just tend not to notice. To illustrate: when I first moved to Baton Rouge, every morning at 4 am I'd be awakened by what sounded to me like a bunch of semis sounding their horns as they blasted by on the interstate. So I was complaining about this one morning to my colleagues over coffee. I couldn't understand it; why would these truckers do this every morning? And why were they all on the interstate at that time every morning? My colleagues just stared at me. Finally Fred said, "Allison, you don't live near the interstate. You live near the train tracks. It's the train." I replied indignantly that of course I lived near the interstate, right by that overpass. And they all gently, gingerly, in that "we're dealing with a mad woman" sort of way, explained to me that no, no, there was no interstate highway under that bridge, just train tracks. So that morning I went and looked, for the first time actually looked, and damn, they were right.

Nowadays, I could just blame menopause. "It's the hormones, Fred," I'd say, and he'd duck for cover faster than a Greenpeace activist at a Tea Party Rally.

Once, some years ago, I admitted to Keith that I really feared getting Alzheimer's. And he replied, "But how would we know?"

Sort of a comfort, really.