Nat King Cole wasn't singing about me

The true art of memory is the art of attention.
–Samuel Johnson

A few months ago when I heard Jeannette Walls speak at the university, one of the questions she answered during the Q & A afterwards was, “Is your memory really that good?” If you’ve read her book The Glass Castle, you’ll understand why that question was asked because Walls wrote an incredibly detailed account of her childhood. Walls’ response was yes, she does have an excellent memory, although she did admit she probably used a little artistic license when writing the dialogue between herself and other family members.

I have a pretty good memory, but I didn’t think I had a superior memory until I heard back from that former boyfriend now band director I e-mailed last week. He was quick, I’ll give him that. He e-mailed me back the next day, but his e-mail was very, very cordial. It was the kind of cordial reserved for crazy folk and those you avoid when you see them coming your way at the grocery store. I’m sure in his book I fit into both of those categories.

The thing that bothered me most about his reply, other than it was written as though I was the mother of one of his students, was that he started out by admitting it “took him a couple of seconds” to remember me.

What the hell? Okay, I get that I blind-sided him a little bit by e-mailing him out of the blue, but we were friends. We were good friends before we ever started dating and making out in his bedroom in various states of undress. I also understand that maybe I’ve been indulging in a little too much Romy and Michelle sentimentality lately and should just stop e-mailing people I haven’t spoken to since high school.

But still, you don’t tell someone YOU DATED that it took time for them to hop back into your memory, even if it only took “a couple of seconds.” I don’t care who you are. That’s a huge ego killer.

That I’m still thinking about this days later indicates how much it bothered me. I finally decided to ask Nathan the crucial question that has been on my mind since receiving the band director’s reply.

“If you saw a girl’s boobs in high school, do you think you’d remember the girl or just the boobs?”

“I don’t think I ever saw a girl’s boobs when I was in high school,” he said.

I sighed. “Well say you had, do you think you’d remember the boobs or the girl’s name?”

“I’d remember yours,” he said and reached for the hem of my t-shirt.

Right. My fault for expecting a serious answer to a question about boobs.

While this band director doesn’t know it, he inadvertently poured salt into an open wound. It would seem that being utterly forgettable is my “thing.” It’s not a thing I’ve accepted like prematurely graying hair or having to go to the bathroom every time I’m in Target. Being forgotten is my Achilles heel, my kryptonite and the one thing guaranteed to send me to the freezer section of my local market for some Ben and Jerry’s. It has happened enough that I was quite sure Terri was going to stand me up at Panera Bread last week and I hate that a mature, intelligent woman like myself is reduced to such childish, hormonal bouts of insecurity.

I think I’m too sensitive. Okay, I know I’m too sensitive, but I also know that I pay attention. I’m a writer. That’s what I do. As writers, we train ourselves to pay attention and remember things; things that mean nothing and things that mean everything, and as bloggers we put it all out here for the world to see. Maybe that’s why I keep doing this. Maybe I’m afraid that if I stop putting little bits of myself out here I’ll disappear completely and be forgotten by more than just the band director.

I probably shouldn’t be so hard on the guy. I certainly haven’t forgotten who I was dating twenty years ago, but men do not pay attention. That much I have learned in eleven years of marriage, so maybe his slight was an honest admission and nothing more. But would it have killed him to have left that part out? The part about having to work to remember me? Nobody really wants to know being remembered took some time. That just means being forgotten was pretty easy.

Maybe I should have attached a picture of my chest. It might have only taken him a second to remember me then.

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