This is About…What was I Saying?

My memory is terrible. Oh you might also say, yeah, mine too, but mine is a cut above.  Or below. 

Not only do I have terrible gaps in my memory, I have some sort of opposite-of-Rainman ability to forget the names of people with whom I’ve been close for several years even as I’m speaking to them.  Not current people, mind you, but people I worked with for ten years, say, ten years ago.  Or people I knew when I was a kid.  Either I get a blank where their name should be or I get someone else’s name altogether.

And speaking of when I was a kid, I couldn’t believe how many people at the “1962 Was A Good Year” reunion could remember details about teachers and classes and tests!  All I can remember are the standout moments.  Like the day the science teacher…no wait…it was English.  No, no, science. But I can’t remember his name. It started with an F.  Fairman!  Anyway, he made me scratch his back with the blackboard pointer at the front of the classroom.  Can you imagine if that happened today?  Fortunately it’s not as satisfying to have your back scratched by a computer mouse.

I can recall only bits and pieces and highlights and lowlights and really, my whole childhood is like that.  For some people it’s all still very clear.  However there aren’t many people like Angel Yuen Man Lai, Canada’s first ever winner of the Canadian Memory Championships held in Toronto last weekend.  Angel had to study a list of 100 random words for 15 minutes and then write them all down in order.  She memorized the order of a deck of cards in five minutes and then put another deck in the same order.

And then there’s Marilu Henner of Taxi fame.  She claims to have the kind of memory that keeps track of every minute of every day of her life.  She is one of six known people in the world who has this type of a memory and she has written a book titled Total Memory Makeover.  For a long time she didn’t realize that this kind of memory is special.  I’ll say.  She got mine as well as her own.  She says it’s like having mini-movies playing in her head all of the time.  If you give her a date she will tell you what day of the week it was, what she ate, who she was with and every little detail.  Remarkable.

Years ago I interviewed Kevin Trudeau who created The Total Memory System and he gave me a copy of it.  I’ve never used it but I keep repacking and shipping it off to wherever I’ve moved.  It’s probably not too surprising to learn that I can’t remember where I put it.

PS.  I have uploaded some photos from the reunion into my photo gallery.  Some of the names are marked only with a ?.  I will fix them once I look those folks up in my yearbooks.  I DO know where those are.