As I strolled out of a shopping centre last week, I pulled the car keys from my pocket. Stop. Wait.
Where did I park? Wanda says it’s the early signs of dementia, but there’s a much more serious discussion to be had around that.
For the moment, I’m looking for a white car. Narrows it down, however for the life of me I can’t recall where I stopped. Third row, fourth row, somewhere around there I think.
It must have taken me half an hour, walking from one row to the next. There was one other poor soul there for a similar time. We smiled a couple of times at each other, pretending car parks were a healthy place to get our steps in, knowing our short-term memories were on a similar spiral.
We actually stopped for a chat at one point, talking about the weather and what a lovely day it was to be out shopping. No mention of car losses. No point raising irrelevant humdrum.
After all, the car was there. Where I’d left it. A bird having added its blessing to the middle of the windscreen.
Then it dawned on me.
As I get older, it’s not the memory which is fading. It’s that I’m becoming more focused in the way I tend to my daily duties.
In my working days, buying a loaf of bread wasn’t so important. Now, multi-grain gluten free bread becomes a consideration of health, and not something I’m keen to mess up or Wanda would be housebound three days with a run of belly stops.
The same goes for the entire shopping list. Buy oats for breakfast, but only the type which is on special. Check the expiry date on the milk, and apologies to the person behind me as I stretched into the top row. When you know there’s an April 10 on the shelf, it would play on my active mind for the rest of the day to walk home with an April 9 expiry sitting in the recycle bag.
So, this is it. The thought process. Before, I’d have jumped out of the car looking for aisle 1B or wherever it was I’d parked, added it to the memory bank and raced in to find some weekly necessities, not a thought given for the brand, price or other detail of what I was about to buy.
Toilet paper was toilet paper, the ply not a consideration. Bruised apples didn’t matter quite as much. And who really would have known there were so many varieties of, well, everything really.
Now, the focus has reversed. The intensity has shifted. I have become a conscious shopper, determined to get the right deal, of the right brand, of the right packing date.
So, when I park the car, my thoughts are firmly alongside the responsibility at hand. I am committed to the task which lays before me. That I have stopped is more important than where I have stopped.
Yes, I understand that causes problems as icecream takes a turn for the worse while I wander the lanes looking for a number plate. That’s really not the point. What I’m ascertaining here is that priorities are shifting.
And that my memory is fully operational.
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