Fat & Ugly

I’m losing my memory.

Mostly I’m glib about it.

“If I tell you something, can you promise you won’t tell anyone?” someone will say to me.

“No worries,” I tell them. “I’ll forget it before I go to sleep tonight.”

And that’s actually true. It seems like every day I put something in the microwave and 40 seconds later, when the beep sounds, I have no recollection of what's in there. I open the door like it’s a present at Christmastime.

A few weeks ago, I flipped to a new week in my calendar and saw a note for Thursday: “4 HR Basketball.” What on earth could that mean? I wondered. It was written at the top of the page, before my 9:30 tennis date with Debi. It seemed to indicate Four Hours of Basketball was on the agenda, but given that I don’t play basketball, watch basketball, have any kids that play basketball and (I’m fairly certain) basketball season had passed, I couldn’t fathom what any basketball anything was doing on my schedule.

Luckily it was still Monday and I had a few days to figure it out. I wracked my mind but as the days passed, no clarity was forthcoming. On Wednesday, I really began to worry that I was supposed to do something or be somewhere the following day, but I had no idea what or where. And certainly not why.

Fortunately a call came in late Wednesday afternoon. The Basketball Hoop Repair Company (which I’d called the previous week to set up a repair for my neighbor’s basketball hoop [the one that my son broke]) was on the line to tell me within which 4 hour period they’d arrive to fix the damage. 4 HR Basketball. I guess when I wrote it down that was all the information I had. Obviously it made sense at the time.

These little brain lapses are taking place all too often. And I get particularly stressed when, like the basketball incident, something is written in a way that makes me think I'm expected to take action. Which is why, this morning, I’m absolutely dumbstruck to read my To Do List for this week. Many of the tasks have been completed, struck through with marker. But a few remain. One being Fat & Ugly. Really. What on earth could I have meant by that?