When I'm sitting around talking to friends, I have a bad habit of not being able to get to the point. I start a story, decide to throw in a couple of details, one of the details leads me off the trail, and I end up lost. I struggle to meander back to what I started to say, but I haven't a clue what it was.
The older I get, the more this seems to be happening. At lunch with a couple of friends recently, I wanted to tell them something about a guy I once worked with, someone we'll call Keith Barker. I began excitedly because my story fit perfectly with what we had been talking about. After three or four sentences about Keith, I headed down a side road and never turned around. I had no idea why I opened my mouth and admitted it. In an admirable effort to comfort me, the youngest person at the table said, "It'll come to you."
It never did. Not during the rest of our lunch, nor when I got home where the pressure was off. Today, weeks later, I haven't the vaguest idea what entertaining tidbit about the life and times of Keith Barker I intended to share. Since this has become a disturbing pattern, I'm working on a way to disguise my short-term memory failures, a crutch that will allow me to pretend I'm right on target.
A small notebook I always carry with me is the key to my scheme. I plan to load it with a series of snappy comments, and the next time I can't remember why I started blowing off about Keith Barker - or someone or something else - I'll simply flip open my notebook, read one of these babies out loud and hope no one knows the difference.
Here's the first draft of "The Larry McCoy Quick Recovery Plan" (patent pending).
If you begin a story and moments later draw a blank on what you were going to say, take a deep breath, pause, pick one of the options below and then confidently resume with the words, "Anyway, what I started to say was:"
Option I
"I once worked with a space cadet named Rodney, and when anyone asked 'How's your wife, Rodney?', he always responded, 'Better than nothing.' "
Option II
"One of my uncles despised Nixon and never got tired of saying, 'You know if Rosemary Woods had been in charge of transcribing the Ten Commandants we'd only have three of them, and maybe there would be nothing wrong with coveting your neighbor's wife.' "
Option III
"I don't know whether it's true, but a guy at the gym claims that France has offered $275 million dollars to North Carolina for permission to use its motto on French license plates - 'First In Flight.' "
If you're 70 or older, feel free to steal any or all of these and please let me know how things turn out. If you're under 70, well, uh…uh, that's uh… uh….
Anyway, what I started to say was I once worked with this space cadet named Rodney, and when anyone….
(Posted May 11, 2010)
