Dejanesia..When Deja Vu and Amnesia collide

A new word perhaps, but we’ve all been there before.  Deja Vu and amnesia.  We’re pretty sure that we’ve forgotten this before.  My husband and are both getting older.  He’s 51 and I’m 50.  We laugh now, but the more times we forget something you start wondering.  Am I really losing it?  Did you really tell me that before and I don’t remember or are you just messing with me?

It’s  not so funny as we get older.

Just this week in the car we were driving and my husband was talking about a part he needed to order for a truck we have for sale.  He hated to order it because it is so expensive for what it is.  I said to him why don’t you just have one of our boys draw up the plans for the part and have some manufactured.  In the long run it could be cheaper and if you have leftover parts you could sell them on Ebay.  Both of our sons do mechanical design work for different companies and are capable of producing the part. 

We drove a little farther and I was rambling on about the part for about 30 seconds and he looked at me like I lost my mind because he couldn’t remember what we were talking about thirty seconds ago and what I was talking about made no sense to him for what he was thinking about.  He tried to pick up some clues to what I was talking about and finally just asked “What were we just talking about?  I don’t remember.” 

Its not only him.  We both get so deep in our thoughts when we travel anywhere.  When one of us starts a conversation we first have to pull the other away from their thoughts and into the present to get their attention.  The older I get I can appreciate quiet and thinking time.

My grandmother had dementia when she died in her nineties.  I guess the fact that it waited until she was in her nineties to show up gives me a few more years before I need to worry.  Is it in my blood?  The thought creeps in when you head all the way down to the basement to get something, get there and can’t remember what you were there for then back upstairs to remember what you went to get or do. 

How many of us have headed down the road and then back home again to check, re-check some item before we head out on vacation?  I have.  I’ve even made it to the airport and called my next door neighbor to please go check if I left my curling iron on in the bathroom.  The old one didn’t have an automatic turn off.

Each year about this time my husband and I help my parents take their sailboat out of the lake for the winter.  It’s something we’ve done just the four of us each fall and then the reverse in the spring. for several years sometimes with snowflakes falling.    Every year we stand scratching our heads trying to remember what has to happen first.  Which cables to loosen before we let the 25′ mast down or wait…do we leave those cables tight until the mast is down then loosen the cables?  Do we have the front of the boat parked uphill or downhill one way was definitely easier last year? Did we remember all the tools we need?  Usually not!

This year so I don’t suffer dejanesia again in the spring I think I will make a list of the sequence of events for the sailboat so that in the spring we won’t be wondering just how we did it the last time.  But then of course we would have to do things in reverse which can create a whole new set of problems.  Some people just can’t comprehend doing things in reverse order even if its written down.  You would think that having the same four people at the same event each year at least one of us would remember the order.  We provide the entertainment for any local fishermen trying to put their boats in or out of the boat landing.  I’m reminded of the Three Stooges show that used to be on Sunday mornings as we got ready for church only now there are four.

I’ll let you know how it goes, unless, of course, I think that I already told you before even if I haven’t.  Dejanesia can be so much fun.

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