Where is it?
Where did I put it? I’ve been muttering this for over a week, trying to find a present I got for my wife—or at least I think I did—that now has evaded my best efforts to locate.
It’s got to be in the garage. She doesn’t snoop around there very much, so any number of boxes and shelves could conceal it. But three different explorations and excavations through foot lockers, drawers, boxes and tubs yielded nothing.
Maybe I put it in my clothes closet? Three more searches came up empty, although the discovery of some Christmas ties I haven’t worn in quite a while at least afforded me some semblance of a reward for my efforts.
Ah, the basement, with its assortment of boxes, storage containers and hideaways—it’s gotta’ be there. Three more forays into our lower floor had me opening, closing, moving and lifting, crawling into and rooting through with no more success. Only scrapes on my knuckles, dust on my fingertips, and a back pleading with me to cease and desist.
Where is it? Every pantry, closet, cupboard, drawer, file cabinet, and bed—musn’t forget to check under the bed—has been thoroughly examined. Still, no present has materialized. This is so frustrating! So before I launch my fourth expedition a la Livingstone futily seeking the Nile’s source, it is time to step back and weigh the possibilities.
Maybe I just think I bought it. I don’t have any receipts I can check, although these would probably yet be in the bag with the present, my hedge against her not liking it and having to take it back to the store for a refund. I do have a clear remembrance of going to the store and looking over the selections. But was I just a window shopper that day, buying myself time to compare other products to get the best buy? Sounds reasonable enough. But why would I do that, seeing this was something I knew my wife would like. And why is it that I can recall—albeit in fuzzy recollection—putting it somewhere in the house. BUT WHERE? Given the fact that I haven’t stumbled upon it in three bottom-to-top searches of our house lends some credibility to the obvious: unpurchased presents are not likely to be found, no matter how hard I look.
Maybe this just confirms that I am starting to lose my mind, taking my first steps down the long and sad road to senility? Like most people in their post-50 years I sometimes worry about this happening to me. I’m sure many who are closest to me would find this a believable diagnosis of occasional absent-mindedness. Yet I still remember quite a lot, often demonstrating a rather expansive capacity to retrieve names, numbers, and trivia from the past, including musical scores I first learned in college and the rosters of my favorite sports teams I memorized in my youth. And, not to be discounted, I still only miss half the questions—or is it the answers—on Jeopardy most nights! That doesn’t sound to me like someone ready for an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
But where could it be? Memory is such a distinctively wonderful aspect of our intelligence, such an essential survival mechanism ensuring that we can function as if we weren’t born yesterday. Lacking a dependable memory, however, cuts us off from most of our normal avenues of communication and social interaction. And when memory loss is profound, we slip into an isolated state of jumbled thoughts that we can neither articulate nor share. So much of who we are and what we can do and be in life depends on our ability to remember. To have a good memory is such an advantage. To not remember names, faces and where we put things, is, well…I wonder if I put it in our outdoor shed? Perhaps what is most important, is that our memory gives us the ability to mark what others have said or done, directing our judgments about who they are and how their words and actions should be interpreted. What a blessing to be able to remember what we’ve heard, what we’ve read, and what we’ve experienced.
Remembering, however, can also be a curse, as all of us well know. Our memories have a way of pushing old, pent-up feelings—particularly those in which we were shamed, or belittled, or just felt inadequate—into the forefront of our thoughts, darkening our mood or compeling us to sulk or quit. For sentimental people like me, memory can keep us grieving for loved ones who left us, or whom we left, far sooner than we were ready to bid them farewell. And it can haunt us by keeping old offenses and slights so close to the surface of our emotions that it becomes nearly impossible for us to live in the now with any pretense of happiness or optimism. Grudges, biases, and the my-mind-is-made-up certainty that is ingrained in so many of us are sad reminders of the power of our memories to misdirect or paralyze us in the present.
Where, oh where, could this thing be?
In working with students over decades in which technology transformed how we receive, process and retrieve information, I began to realize how similarly our minds and computers operate. Both require the input from outside themselves that they translate, record, and store for future recall and manipulation. Our cerebral computer makes good use of an operating system unique to our species, one that comes in personalized versions that make each of us just a bit different from each other. Superior to anything we can purchase with keys and monitors, our brain has the remarkable capacity to receive information sent to it from our ears, eyes, noses, skin (feel and temperature), mouths—just about every orifice and organ through which sensate beings like us perceive the world within us and outside of ourselves. I suspect that cyborgs and other techno creations will, in the future, match and exceed the number and variety of our sensory inputs. But right now I believe our senses and intuitions still give us an advantage over computers, except when we take one on in chess.
If this foregoing analogy makes any sense, then my failure to find the missing Christmas present would seem to be simply explained: I didn’t give my memory of where I put it—or if I even bought it—a file name that I can now recall. Hence it remains hidden from me, as out of reach as those docs my computer automatically saves under some numerical default title I can neither identify nor remember. Now I realize the computer only does this when I fail to type in a file name that clearly identifies it to me. But then the computer compounds my mistake by saving this now disguised file to a default folder which seems to have no reasonable connection to it or for me. Apparently my brain worked much this way when I hid my wife’s present, you know the one I may or may not have actually purchased. My haste and carelessness through the whole process, i.e., my failure to correctly name and store it, has now reduced my otherwise clear and dependable memory to a mush of disconnected impressions, all of which lie beyond my cognitive retrieval. Drat! Where in the world did I put this? Filename not recognized!
Oh well, I guess I better stop this ruminating and go look for it once again, for the fourth time I believe. Perhaps if I try to recreate my steps from store to car, car to home, car to garage, shelf to shelf inspection of the garage, then up the stairs into the house, something may jog my memory and the now hidden file—I mean gift—will suddenly appear. But if that process still leaves my hands empty and my Christmas list unfinished, there will be nothing left to do but bite the bullet, go back to the store, and find closure to my frustrations at the checkout counter. But if I do that you can rest assured, this time I will be certain to remember—perhaps with sticky notes or a bread crumb trail--where I put it!
