Split shift

Like many of my fellow authors, I'm busily publishing my backlist on Kindle and other e-book platforms. My workdays are split between writing the new novel and dipping into books I wrote years ago.

The latest novels to become available as e-books are WITCHY WOMAN and SHAKY GROUND, third and fourth in my seven-book Bubba Mabry series. Only $2.99 each. I'll have the fifth one in the series, DIRTY POOL, up on Kindle by the end of the week.

I'm one of those authors who rarely reads his own work after it's published. Typos or mistakes make me crazy; stuff I wrote years ago sometimes makes me cringe. But I actually enjoyed proofreading these Bubba books. Still funny and weird and fast-paced.

I found quirks and allusions that still pop up in my writing. This included one line that I'd used fifteen years ago (something about New Mexico's silvery sunlight and turquoise skies) that I was trying to wedge into my work-in-progress. No memory that I'd used it before. Thought I was being original.

Anyhow, I still love Bubba, after all these years. Now that e-books are shaking up publishing, maybe I'll even write another Bubba Mabry adventure one of these days...

For now, I'm halfway through the first draft of my new standalone, A BOX OF PANDORAS, and I'm having a ball.

Nest is never quite empty

I was digging around in a file cabinet in my home office when I found a cowboy tucked into one corner of a drawer. He's quite the frontiersman, armed with a rifle, a pistol and a knife, and crouched in a kneeling position perfect for sniping.

Been a long time since our sons -- ages 21 and nearly 19 -- played with little plastic cowboys. Wonder how long that cowboy has been waiting in that drawer for someone to rescue him?

You can't tell it from my stellar cellphone photography, but the cowboy is pretty detailed, with windswept bandana, fringed shirt and the words, on his base, "Made in China."

I'm keeping him on my desk, a reminder that my sons are never as far away as they seem.

Forget about it

I once called my wife at work, pulled her out of some important meeting, and said two words when she came on the line: "Annette Bening."

She thanked me, hung up, went back to her job.

No, we were not speaking secret-agent code. The night before, we'd seen a few minutes of some TV costume drama and couldn't identify "the actress in the turban." We both recognized her, but no amount of free-association brainstorming could turn up her name. We'd gone to bed stumped.

"Annette Bening" came to me fourteen hours later while I was cleaning the kitchen. I wasn't even thinking about the TV show. But some part of my brain had scanned the memory banks all that time and suddenly coughed up, "Annette Bening." Go figure.

Immediately upon recalling the name "Annette Bening," I phoned my wife. Two reasons: 1) We all love to be first with the correct "Jeopardy" answer, and 2) I knew I'd forget again any minute.

That my wife immediately understood what I was talking about and that she was grateful for the information shows her memory banks had been whirring the whole time, too. Now she could devote that brain space to something else, such as work.

This, my friends, is the current fate of the Baby Boomer. We're reaching "that certain age" where we're starting to forget things. A lot. And it worries us.

Most middle-aged people I know moan about memory loss. In the past week, I've heard the same complaint from two separate people: "It's not that I can't remember things. I can't remember the names of things." This condition inhibits their conversation and makes them fret.
Others find themselves constantly apologizing for missed appointments and broken dates. Many resort to palm-sized computers to keep track of their busy lives, then forget where they left their palm-sized computers.

My problem seems navigational. I'll get up from my desk and go to the kitchen on some errand. When I get to the kitchen, I pause, recognize I have no idea what I was planning to do. I wander back to my desk, then remember the task in the kitchen. I must hurry back to the kitchen to accomplish the task before it flits from my mind again. Then the process repeats.

I often come to in a different room with no notion of what propelled me there. Invariably, I've left my coffee cup elsewhere. So now I'm stranded in the wrong end of the house, nothing to drink, no idea what I was doing or where I should go next.

Worse yet, I do this same routine when I'm driving.

I gave up remembering people's names years ago. I just smile and nod and hope they don't notice. But now we can't remember the names of things? If we can't remember the word "fork," how long before we forget what one is used for?

This is our present, Baby Boomers, and we can only imagine what our doddering, fork-free future will be like.

The cause of this malaise? Brain cells die off as we age, and they take some of our memories and capabilities with them. Many of us accelerated this process in our youths, usually in activities that involved kegs.

But the main reason we can't remember anything is that we have too much to remember. We get too much input -- TV, books, advertising, computers, relatives, strangers all blaring messages at us all day long. We get too little quiet time and way too little sleep, so the messages come faster than our brains can process them. Under this constant barrage, our brains get full and the new stuff starts to push out the old.

To put this in computer terms: The hard-drive is at capacity. All incoming data erases existing data. Do you want to continue?

If the hard-drive is full now, what will we be like in twenty or thirty years?

A 75-year-old woman told me recently that when she can't remember something, she just waits. "It comes eventually."

And when it doesn't?

"Then you call friends. Ask them."

Ah. Regis, keep those lifelines open. I may need them, especially if the answer is anything other than "Annette Bening."

Ol' Whatsisname

Sometimes, we work-at-home hermits must go out into the greater world, where we run into old friends and strike up conversations and generally act like we haven't become total social misfits.

And we're reminded that other people have lives, too, even if we're too caught up in our own domestic melodramas to keep in touch. Not only that, but they have names, and they expect us to remember them.

Seems like everywhere I go, I run into familiar faces. The swimming pool, the supermarket, the bank. All my old acquaintances are out and about, ready with a handshake and a smile. And I have no idea who these people are.

I know I should know them. I recognize their faces. Sometimes, I can even put them into context -- I know this person from my kid's school or from some party or from a story I covered back when I had a regular newspaper job. But their names? Gone. Forgotten. Erased from the memory banks.

If people were computers, I could just display an "Insufficient memory at this time" message and go on my merry way. Users understand that when it comes from machines. But they expect me -- a fellow human -- to remember their names, which leads to some awkward conversations:

"Hi there. You look so familiar. I know that face, but your name escapes me. Yes, yes, of course. I remember you. You just were out of context. I’m not used to seeing you all dressed up like that. Heh, heh. That's right, we went to school together. And then there was college. Right. Roomed together, you say? Uh-huh. Then there were those ten years we worked together at the newspaper. Sure. Oh, yeah, I DID see you last weekend at that cookout. Of course. Sorry. I’m terrible with names. "

How did this happen? I'd hate to blame creeping age. I prefer not to think about that, though the mirror tells the cruel truth. And I don't want to blame the excesses of my youth, when millions of brain cells gave up their lives to the cause of tequila.

Instead, I'll blame my children.

I trace my memory loss to the moment I chose to become a stay-at-home-dad. I isolated myself from the world, working at home and spending most of my time with two young boys. And without regular contact with other adults, I began to forget about them. In particular, their names.

My social circle shrank to the number of guys who can fit around a poker table. One close friend I see regularly, the occasional lunch out with others, but that's it. The rest of the time, I'm home with the boys, forgetting everyone else.

Meanwhile, my sons' social circle keeps growing. As they get older, they make more friends and I'm expected to remember the friends' names. And those friends have parents. And they all have names, too. Most of the parents I know have just given up. Now we greet each other with, "Hi, you're So-and-so's Dad." And we nod, knowing that's enough.

(That brings me to Today's Parenting Theory: The section of the human brain that holds other people's names is erased by high-pitched squeals, such as those frequently emitted by children. Enough yowling around the house, and our brains are washed clean.)

There's one more factor here: I write fiction as well as this column (which isn't exactly the same thing), so I spend a lot of time with my imaginary friends. More time, actually, than I spend with real, breathing adults. All day long I'm in the company of characters like Bubba Mabry and Felicia Quattlebaum and Otis Edgewater and Benjamin Dover. (Get it? Ben Dover? Har.) Those names are easy to remember because I made them up.

Maybe that's the answer in the real world, too. I'll invent new names for the people I meet. Give them some moniker I'll be more likely to remember.

So, if you run into me somewhere and I call you "Gertrude Beeblefitz," I'm sure you'll understand. You can call me "So-and-so's Dad."