Puzzling

As a lifelong addict of puzzle-solving, or at least of taking a whack at it, I’ve been delighted to note that nowadays neurologists and gerontologists recommend that we seniors keep our minds sharp by doing crossword puzzles. To me, that’s a bit like giving a chocolate lover the key to the Godiva factory.

Give me almost any kind of word puzzle: jumbled words, anagrams, crosswords, cryptograms, acrostics; I love them all. I do avoid those “puns and anagrams” things, perhaps because I suffered mightily from an older relative who made a groan-worthy pun out of almost any utterance, as in:

(me) "Good morning"

(he) "Who died?" (i.e. good mourning)

Those puns were his only sin, as far as I know, and we all loved him so dearly that we endured his excesses. But an entire puzzle based on that kind of cleverness doesn’t appeal to me at all.

In any event, back in my sixties, when I read the advice of those who are experts in the elderly mind, I figured that as a word puzzle addict, I was well set to keep myself mentally fit. I come from a family whose women have remarkable (and some would say dreadful) genes for living long. All my older female relatives have died in their 90’s, and both grandmothers and a great aunt came close to a hundred. If you’re likely to live that long, you need to do everything you can to take care of your mental agility.

So why, please tell me, did I, so well-armed for bear, reach my current age of 74 only to find that what used to be a remarkable memory has suddenly gone south on me? In the past couple of years I have had to admit that I’ve fallen prey to almost every cliché concerning old age/memory loss.

Oh, I’m not talking deep memories. Those lie buried under the dross of many years, but they’re there. They seem to come in two types: those that pop up at need unaided, and those that take their own sweet time. The latter may not be readily accessible, but eventually they do float to the surface, usually in the wee hours of the morning. My husband and I refer to them as "the 2 a.m. elbow-jab type," something which happens in answer to a blank moment at the dinner table, when neither of us can recall a name or event, but which then pops up with a blaze of triumph at an ungodly hour.

"It was (fill in the blank)," one of us will say with an elbow nudge. The only possible response is a muttered "Right. Thanks.") as one turns over and goes back to sleep. Both of us may have forgotten the answer by morning, but at least we’ve had our moment of glory.

But what of the more immediate kind of memory trouble? I’m referring to the sort that finds me standing in front of the refrigerator, suddenly wondering why on earth I opened the door, or going down to the basement pantry for paper towels and coming up with a jar of salsa instead. Those things are, I think, more a matter of losing focus than of true memory. I’ve always been distractible, but these days it’s as if the problem has gone onto steroids. It does help to stay calm and try to recreate the moments just before I undertook whatever it was I’ve forgotten, but while I can often repair the damage to the errand, it’s harder to repair the damage to my self-esteem.

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Puzzling

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