Kinsler: Runtime memory failure 6a28: Where did we leave the car?
If two people live together for years they’ll gain a trove of memories to share in their golden years. Amendment: the longer two people live together, the more periods of common memory failure they’ll experience.
Episodes of shared brain failure indeed seem to be showing up more often for us these days. My long-married friend Evelyn once observed that she and Gary add up to slightly more than one person these days, and apparently Natalie and I are at that same stage.
What happened today was that we went walking through our local shopping mall for some exercise insisted upon by my altitude-challenged health officer. River Valley Mall has survived some 22 annual predictions of its demise during the time we’ve lived here, and one reason is a clever management office. For one thing, they’ve made sure that the mall is as clean as a hospital, and they did so all through the pandemic. Another is someone’s observation that nobody ever remembers last year’s Christmas ornaments in a store or a mall, so they’re re-using previous yuletide ornamentation, including Santa’s golden throne.
The place looked lively and commercially healthy, with vendor’s kiosks selling books, ornaments, and silly calendars for 2023. But our favorite Christmas vendor seemed to be missing.
She and her neat corporate stand were gone. Worse, neither of us could, for the life of us, remember the name of the company, which sold Christmas food like candy, cheese, and sausage. “I know what to do,” said Natalie, pulling out her smartphone. “I’ll Google “’smoked sausage’.”
But alas, no familiar names showed up on the list. “And now I’ll be getting sausage ads for the rest of my life,” she groused. I regret to report that I laughed.
And so we continued our walking regime in the mall, after which we checked on the earthly delights available at Walmart, which had zero smoked sausage clues therein.
So we nominally forgot about the whole thing and went on with our lives, but we continued our individual mental searches. There was no way we could have forgotten that name in the pre-geriatric era and it was driving us both nuts.
At 3:44am the Light of Truth finally dawned upon my withered brain. Addressing the dark, I announced my research results to our two sleeping alley cats and a sleeping Natalie:
“It was Hickory Farms of Ohio.”
Mark Kinsler, kinsler33@gmail,com, lives with Natalie and the aforementioned pair of cats in a little old house in Lancaster, a lovely antique of a town where the streets look like it’s still 1908.
This article originally appeared on Lancaster Eagle-Gazette: Kinsler: Runtime memory failure 6a28: Where did we leave the car?
