Forgetfulness

Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States (2001-3), best-selling author, and the recipient of numerous prizes, is one of the few serious American poets whose work is accessible to the general reader. Even so, I hadn't heard of him until I stumbled upon one of his poems. I found it on the back page of an article that a New York friend had cut out from The Atlantic and mailed to us in Jerusalem. The poem is "Forgetfulness." You can find the poem in Collins's Questions about Angels (1991) and in his Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001).

In the poem's first stanza, Collins suggests that our forgetting follows a pattern. After reading a novel, you first forget the author's name, and then, in the following sequence, the title, the plot, the conclusion, until finally the book becomes one you never heard of. He's right about that. On a trip abroad, I once bought a paperback edition of a Trollope novel, read it with pleasure, and, when I returned home and put it on the shelf, I discovered that the novel was already there. Since I'm the only Trollope aficionado in the family, it was clear I had read the novel once before but had utterly forgotten it.

It's as if, Collins continues, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain / to a little fishing village where there are no phones. He's not writing about the "tip of the tongue phenomenon," when the word or name you're searching for is tantalizingly within reach. Often you know the number of the word's syllables, even some of its sounds, but you can't quite find it. Only later, after an interval ranging from a few minutes to a few hours, when you're thinking about something else, it comes to you unbidden. Collins isn't writing about that. No, he's writing about those memories - the name of a state capital, perhaps, your second cousin's married name, a poem that you once memorized - that have gone forever.

About five years ago at a bookstore, I placed an order for a book. The clerk told me that he would call me when it arrived and then asked for my phone number. He might as well have asked me what his phone number was. I had no idea, although of course I knew that I should know. Although this incident shocked me, it didn't make me wonder if it was the first sign of dementia. Nothing like that happened again until a few weeks ago, after a pleasant lunch with my niece and her significant other. When I called a car service to take my wife and me home, I gave the dispatcher the number of our street but then I couldn't remember the name of our street. I had to ask my wife where we live.

This was no worse, I suppose, then forgetting my telephone number, but unlike the incident in the bookstore, this time I felt not only shock but panic. Five years ago I didn't know that almost half of all those 85 and over suffer some degree of dementia, and of course five years ago I was not almost 80. So although I eventually recovered both my telephone number and my address, I now worry. Will the day come when I can't retrieve them or, once I recall them, can't remember them? Well, I tell myself, if I'm on the train to dementia, I haven't reached the station yet, and in the meantime, I'll do my best to enjoy the ride.