New Year’s resolution: shaking off the brain fog

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/01/2019 (2777 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s 2019, kids, and there’s something I’d like you all to do.

Drop whatever you are holding — unless it’s a scalding cup of coffee or a squawling baby — look into the nearest mirror and ask yourself the following question: “Am I ready to face another year on this planet?”

That’s exactly what I plan to do, or at least I will as soon as my aging brain can remember where the nearest mirror is in my house.

Here we are, five days into 2019, and my brain is having a great deal of difficulty with its primary function, by which I mean remembering stuff.

I am pretty sure that, as we age, our brains have a smaller and smaller capacity for storing important information, such as which of our kids requires insulin (I’ll ask my wife) and which team won the Stanley Cup in 1956, the year I was born (the Montreal Canadiens).

I began worrying about my shrivelling brain’s ability to recall vital information just before Christmas when I met a friend for lunch downtown, then returned home and discovered that I’d left my favourite scarf behind on a seat in the restaurant.

We are not talking about some ordinary scarf. No, this is a six-foot-long, black-and-white scarf that my wife knitted for me several years ago when I complained that she didn’t love me because she had never knitted me anything. It probably required the wool of six sheep to make this scarf, so it is a hard one to accidentally misplace.

Naturally, I handled this brain cramp in a calm and dignified manner — I called my wife at work and asked if she wouldn’t mind dropping by the restaurant to pick it up, which she agreed to do, because she was impressed that I cared enough about it to notice it was missing in the first place.

Then, after Christmas, there I was, sitting in a chair at the salon owned by Marla, the woman who has been cutting my hair for the past 30 years or so. I was staring at a bracelet on her wrist when my malfunctioning brain began to tingle.

“Hmmm,” I said, while Marla trimmed my runaway eyebrows. “Didn’t I buy a bracelet just like yours the last time I got my hair cut? And some shampoo and some of those electric candles, too?”

Marla frowned at me and then replied: “You sure did.”

Which is when my brain suddenly remembered that those items, purchased as Christmas stocking stuffers, were still sitting in a plastic bag hidden in the back of my closet.

“Ha ha ha,” is what Marla said when I told her I’d completely forgotten about those presents. “Your mind isn’t exactly a steel trap anymore.”

If it were just those two lapses in memory, I wouldn’t be fussing over my brain’s diminished capacity, but, sadly, the worst was yet to come.

What happened was, my buddy Bob, who also happens to be my boss, invited me (and my brain) and the rest of my family to join his family at a recent Winnipeg Jets hockey game, where we got to sit in the spacious Free Press suite with a bunch of other local hockey fans.

My brain doesn’t recall much of the game — which the Jets lost — but it does recall that I spent most of the evening sitting beside an extremely pleasant man who was roughly the same age and size as myself.

The first thing this fellow did was introduce himself. But, the sad truth is, whenever someone (anyone) tells me their name these days, here is what my less-than-razor-sharp brain hears: “Hello, I’m Blah Blah Blah. Nice to meet you.”

So I’m sitting beside “Blah Blah Blah” and, because the game was less than thrilling, we ended up deep in conversation about our lives, which are remarkably similar.

It turned out this gentleman, whose name I couldn’t recall seconds after he told me, was the exact same age as me and had played junior football in Winnipeg at exactly the same time as I did.

“I used to play for the St. Vital Mustangs,” he told me as we kept one eye on the hockey game.

“Really,” I replied. “I played for the Fort Garry Lions at the same time, so we must have played against each other.”

Which is when I racked my brain to come up with the name of the one and only football player I could recall from those heady days back in the early 1970s.

Choking down a mouthful of popcorn, I turned to my seatmate and said: “Hey, I’ll bet you know a guy named Stew Heaton. He was the quarterback for the Mustangs back then. I was never able to tackle that (bad word) guy!”

This brought a huge smile to the lips of the fellow seated next to me. He laughed heartily, turned to me and calmly replied: “Yes, I know Stew Heaton quite well,” he said.

Which is when I said: “That’s cool. I thought you’d know him.”

And the guy next to me said: “In fact, I remember him really well, because I AM Stew Heaton.”

Which is when my aging brain decided to inform me that I was, in fact, an idiot, so I just looked at Stew and half-heartedly chuckled “ha ha ha” to convey the notion that maybe I was kidding around in a light-hearted manner but most likely I had the mental capacity of your standard house plant.

But, I am not about to let a few mental lapses get me down as we celebrate a brand-new year and the hope it represents for a brighter future.

It’s going to be a great year, and that’s exactly what I plan on telling myself — just as soon as I can find where my wife hid the (bad word) mirror.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca