Is it a storybook life?
Some times I just wish I could remember things. I’m smart. I have common sense. I’m not some simpleton walking around with a minimal number of brain cells but the truth is that I struggle to remember certain types of things. Like names of people and how I know them.
I was at a baseball game a few nights ago when this lady calls my name and asks how I’m doing. I sit down and we chat. Obviously she knows who I am - it would be rude to not have a friendly conversation just because I have no idea who she is. I recognized her. She looked familiar. I knew I was supposed to know her. Yet I could not place her. I ran through the past four years of my life trying to drop her into a category: did she work at the university? the nursing home back when I worked there? was she a professor? Finally I placed her as a university employee but I still don’t know her name. She knows all about me - that I graduated, that I work for the paper, my name - my whole life basically. Awesome, memory. Thanks for being a real tool and not coming through in the clutch when I needed you.
Speaking of seeing people, I stopped by the farmer’s market yesterday morning on my way home from work (5:30 a.m. to take pictures of a marathon is not my idea of fun - especially after celebrating a birthday with adult beverages the night before. Ouch.). And I’m perusing the dismally small amount of produce when someone calls my name. I look up. Sweet mother of Frank it’s Geraldine - my old supervisor from when I used to work at the nursing home. She’s kind of a shiftless sort. She once asked me, a broke college kid, for gas money so she could get back and forth to work. She paid me back in one dollar bills.
So Geraldine and I had a heart-to-heart. I ask her what she’s up to these days and she tells me she got fired in November. Then she tells me that her supervisor got fired as well and is now working as a stock person at Wal-Mart. She said it with malicious glee but I failed to see where Geraldine had any ground to stand on in her superiority since I can’t really see that she’s doing much besides trying to make a living at the farmer’s market. Then she tells me that another one of our old co-workers might still be working there but her husband died in a car crash.
After making my pity purchase of a tiny loaf of bread for $1.50, I walked away thinking to myself that a lot of days, my life is something you’re supposed to read about in books and magazines.
