What with Alzheimer's looming in my future, I find it hard to take when I can't remember things. Mostly it's names -- of people, things, places -- that I can't remember, although it usually comes to me eventually.
Memory is an odd thing. People do remember things wrong sometimes and have memories they believe are genuine when they aren't. It puts me in mind of a time several of us had gone to play racquetball. We were sitting around in the locker room waiting for it to be time to claim the courts we had reserved. One young woman named Janice, who was quite a bit younger than I, was idly bouncing a racquetball against a row of lockers, which was making a racket (so to speak) and which I found annoying. I finally turned my head to look at her and said in a perfectly normal tone of voice, "Janice." She stopped.
Later that week I ran into her and a group of her friends. She introduced me as the one who had yelled at her for bouncing the ball in the locker room. I denied having raised my voice, but she reported that I had said, "Damn it, Janice! Quit doing that!" I protested again, but she insisted that is what I had said, even though all I had said was her name. Evidently her memory of it had been distorted by her emotional reaction to the rebuke.
At least, that's how I remember it.
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