Thursday, December 02, 2010

Aging Mind, Young Memory

Today, picking up my prescriptions at the pharmacy, I saw a young woman who looked so much like someone I knew that I almost spoke to her...could it be her? Then I realized that the young woman I'd known would now be in her 40's.

I tweeted the experience, as part of my "This is what aging is" series. My friend Jess, who blogs awesometastically, responded (translating from Twitter), "So your brain is aging but your memory isn't? :)"

I thought that was beautiful. I haven't seen the woman the girl in the pharmacy reminded me of in many years. I don't know what her life has been like, though I hope she's happy, or if she ever wishes to again be the age at which I knew her. In a sense, though, she'll live as a young woman, preserved in the amber of my memory, for as long as I live. So, too, will all the people that inhabit my memories, wherever life (or perhaps death) has taken them since we last met.

4 comments:

  1. That's an interesting perspective, and I think I will get there someday, too. I already have middle-age brain issues where there's so much accumulated in my memory that it takes longer to recall certain things that took less time when I had less stuff in there! But your experience gives me hope that when I do get there, I will have these delightful (if mistaken) flashback moments!

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  2. These moments can be fun! I just hope they never result in restraining orders! :)

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  3. Sci-Fi author Robert Heinlein wrote in "A Stranger in a Strange Land" that (paraphrased) that "An artist can portray a woman as she appears now. A great artist can portray the woman she will be when she is old. But only a master can portray an old woman as she was as a young woman"

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  4. This post just brought me to tears. I am not sure why, but this moved me to tears.

    I am getting old. :)

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T Minus Two by Bob Pedersen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.