Memory

I was forced to give up working at the age of fifty five. My short-term memory loss had made me a menace to others. My work being electrical and industrial instrumentation.

The problem had crept up unnoticed although it had happened years earlier, my reaction to stress. I had been charging my family with not telling me things that I should have been told while they were at the same time charging me with not listening. The problem was masked by the fact that my long-term memory was excellent and remains so. Finally, the difficulty could no longer be overlooked.

It was not that things were being forgotten but that they were not being recorded at all leading to constant surprises. As an instance of how bad things became, if you and I were talking and a loud noise made me look away, the moment that you were out of my vision I would no longer be aware that you were there or that we had been having a conversation. I would look back and be shocked to find you standing at my side. ‘Where on earth have you popped up from?’

I had to give up driving. Coming out of a side street I would look right and there would be a car approaching and close. Then I would look left and the car on my right ceased to exist. I had a number of near accidents, angry horns blown. There were the other cases where I would drive confidently up to a roundabout only then to realise that I had no idea where I was going or, if I did, how to get there. I would have to pull off the road, baffled.

Short-term memory is very much our hold, or otherwise, on reality. I was home alone. My wife was away. The morning was sunny and it was warm in the breakfast area. I had a good book and decided to settle down and have a good read but first I saw that I had left the cane wash basket out at the line overnight. I brought it in and put it in the laundry. I spent the entire morning in the breakfast area and when it got close to lunchtime my conscience told me that there was work to do. I went into the laundry to put some washing on and found that the basket now held three machine loads ready to be hung out. I looked at them in bewilderment since I definitely had not done them. I was willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that I had been reading all morning and hadn’t moved. My time there was seamless. But then, no-one else could have done them. There had been no-one else in the house and I would have heard the machine running which I certainly had not. Elves could it be? I was almost ready to believe in something of the sort. That was a typical happening.

I also had problems with visual recognition both of people that I saw almost every day and objects On one occasion I could not find our car although it was parked directly opposite me. My wife and son were sitting in it. I did not know them. It made for a very uncertain world. I told the friends that if I snubbed them in the street it was because they were strangers to me. They would have to greet me and even when they did greet me and I deduced from the conversation who they were they still looked unfamiliar. My wife would drive me into town and almost every day I saw, always with some shock, large buildings that were definitely not there yesterday. Once on a trip back from Wanganui an entire town seemed to have sprung magically into existence. It is strange how even when one knows that one’s memory is faulty one still accepts its verity.

We lived in the small town of Normanby and one evening for some reason my wife decided to clean the floor. I can get ill just walking through the cleaning products aisle at the supermarket so I thought it best to go out for a walk. I was about two hundred metres from home and had rounded just the one corner when I realised with dismay that I was no longer in Normanby. I knew every part of Normanby from my daily walks and this was definitely somewhere else although apparently occupying the same physical space as Normanby. That I had walked only two hundred metres was certain but how I had stumbled into this somewhere else I did not know. I had always thought of parallel universes as an interesting concept though not in accord with Christian belief and yet here I was in one. That fact seemed indisputable. And not knowing how I got there meant not knowing how to get back to my own reality and the realities were supposed to be infinite in number. My wife and children were probably physically close but were now forever unreachable. One has to be in the situation in which I apparently found myself to realise my profound despair. I was also in fear. I had yet to meet the people of this reality. What would they be like?

There was a happy ending. I wandered around until I finally recognised the Commercial Hotel. Doctor Kardos who knew me well put me on the sickness benefit.