On the other hand, one could eat more fish

MY mum used to have a saying: We can’t all and some of us don’t.

She’d apply this phrase to almost any situation. It came from A.A. Milne’s stuffed donkey character, Eeyore, whose actual remark was, “We can’t all and some just don’t. That’s all there is to it.”

Lately, I feel that Eeyore’s line pairs nicely with another A.A. Milne favourite, “Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?” In tandem, these donkeyisms sum up my current state of being.

Let me explain before I forget. You see, there are fast learners, there are slow learners, and then there are learners upon whom understanding rests as lightly as mist upon a lake. I’ve always belonged in the last category. So that’s the first issue. Then you add memory problems stemming from my ongoing recovery from brain surgery and – well, let’s just say the Canadian Space Agency has told me not to send it any more applications.

Trouble is, everybody who’s my age or older claims to be cursed with forgetfulness. Of course, most of them can still recall what a doorknob is called. And they don’t repeatedly refer to a stove as a fridge. But apparently they occasionally forget where they put down their half-full can of Diet Coke. Thus, whenever I moan about my lapses, they assure me that they, too, have dimwitted moments.

I guess it’s nice to belong to a whole demographic that’s rapidly disintegrating, if only because there’s lots of pop culture advice out there on fending off witlessness by exercising our brains. Use it or lose it, say the TV doctors and PBS fundraiser pundits. And so I’ve been trying to do some mental calisthenics. I don’t have the patience for crossword puzzles or the spatial skills for Sudoku or even the manual dexterity to complete a dot-to-dot. Instead, my kind of marathon is retrieving the names of vaguely obscure people from my distant past. Try it! You’ll hate it!

I found myself doing this recently, while having a follow-up MRI. The challenge there is lying perfectly still for more than an hour while the magnetic resonance imaging machine makes random knocking sounds, like a narwhal hunting halibut.

You must ignore the fact that you’ve detected a miniscule hair barely grazing your forehead, begging you to brush it away. I distracted myself by focusing on some people I used to write about as a dance critic in Calgary. Eighteen years ago, I chatted with them often. The woman’s name sprang instantly to mind, but her husband’s – what was it?

I spent about an hour reaching back into my memory, picturing him, his big, unstylish beard, his small, trim physique, the pinky nail he left too long (supposedly for guitar-plucking purposes), the bitter smell of Middle Eastern spices the night we were invited for dinner. I remembered his devotion to his wife’s dance career, and his dry observations about his work, fundraising for the arts.

I finally came up with a first name on my way home -- just before discovering I’d accidentally taken away the laminated instruction sheet intended for MRI patients to read before disrobing. Sigh.

The last name of this fellow, though? Still drawing a blank, I used the technique I’d learned in brain injury rehab: describe your way around it and maybe it will come to you. Hmmm.  It seemed to me there was something faintly verboten about his last name. Did it hint at something risqué? Was it easily mispronounced? Might a person jump to some awful conclusion about this fellow on the basis of it?

Still nothing. I needed a life-line, my Winnipeg friend who had taken over the dance critic gig when I left and now writes for the Free Press. In an email to her, I named the wife, said I thought her husband’s first name was Peter. Alison remembered him, but also drew a blank. So I issued a challenge – Alison’s merely middle-aged brain versus my middle-aged, lightly damaged brain in a fight to the finish over the surname of a guy neither of us had spoken to in at least 10 years. Using the Internet would be cheating.

I continued to comb the gnarled recesses of my grey matter, but still no go – until 10:30 at night, when I sprang out of bed, triumphant. I’d been thinking about this for almost eight hours, instead of working on my proposal to the Canadian Space Agency for scenic shortcuts between here and the moon. “Hoff!” I shouted, then scampered down the hall to my office to email Alison first, just in case she got struck by the same thunderbolt.  She corroborated my memory and was gracious in defeat.

I don’t like to trouble her with my incessant “name the round object that opens a door” quizzes. Those, I save for my family. But two days later I had another, less tedious challenge. The movie Roadhouse had been on TV, co-starring that actor, the handsome, laconic one who’s always in Westerns, who’s forever buried behind a giant grey moustache. I knew he was married to Katharine Ross.

“Who is that, again?” I had asked my husband Stanley, God knows why.

“That’s Sam Shepherd,” he replied confidently. (We can’t all and some of us don’t.)

“You stay out of this,” I said, and rushed upstairs to e-mail Alison the details of my latest “remember something” throwdown.

This time she trumped me smoothly, sending an email as I was once again going through the alphabet, testing out consonants that might strike the name Sam and ignite a recollection. “Sam Elliott?” she wrote. “I got to interview him in person when he made a movie outside Calgary and was the marshal of the Stampede parade. He was lovely, and very attractive in person.” 

D-oh! Personal acquaintance with the movie star, plus a memory advantage. Point Alison!

Once upon a time, my friends and I played Trivial Pursuit, complete with colourful board and plastic “pie” markers. The victor was the one with the best head for details. These days, for some of us, the game pops up unbidden and unwanted.

And so it must continue. But I do have the ultimate stumper if I ever get fed up with Alison one-upping me.

“What’s the name of that volcano in Iceland, again?” I’ll ask. She’ll never, ever get that. 

Of course, I’ll have had to remember what my stump question was in the first place.