MEMORY AND 5AM INSANITY

The mind is a funny thing. Particularly the part dealing with memory; the temporal lobe, just to prove that I have not forgotten nursing school. (To be fair, I had to ask Google to make sure…) I have quite the temporal lobe if I do say so myself. Far larger than my husband’s, who I am sure suffered an injury at some point in his life; now he is one of those people who wake up with no memory of the day before. This has its upsides and its downsides. For instance, when he has to remember to pay a bill - a down side; when I have a hissy fit on par with a five year old he has no recollection of it a week later… when I am having another one…  While my memory is far superior to Alan’s,  it seems to be some sort of a filing system run by a little angry old lady living in it and randomly pulling things out at the worst possible moments. She gets angrier as the day goes on and seems to stage an all out protest at night.  Because, as I am drifting off to sleep, I sit bolt upright, heart racing in sheer panic, that I forgot to email a distant relative to remind him/her that I love him/her. And quite the opposite, in the wee hours of the morning I will wake, heart racing and remember the mean thing I said to my tormentors when I was a teenager. Who am I kidding I never got a chance to say anything to those little %^&*$. So it is usually a reliving of some embarrassing moment like when I peed my pants in front of those same tormentors. I don’t know what the little angry old lady living in my temporal lobe has against me but I am sure it is not good for my blood pressure and I wish she would retire and a hip, young, organized, type-A personality with an iPhone would take her place. Then I would become a calm, collected, organized and preferably published writer. This doesn’t seem to be the case yet but one has hope.

As many of you know, we recently returned from my sister’s beautiful wedding in Napa, super fun except for the incident of the bridesmaid with the elephant leg shoved in a doll shoe… I have not decided if I will write a blog about this because I have not stopped crying about it AND about saying goodbye, so it is not funny yet. And if I did write it, I may have to change the name of my blog to “angry ranting sick lady…” which does not really appeal… I think. After an amazing three weeks we board our flight home (one flight this time but I still manage to get no sleep). We navigate our way through immigration and collect our luggage and lineup for customs check. We of course pick the slowest line. I keep Al calm (the calmest person I know EXCEPT when traveling when he undergoes some sort of psychotic break and Amelia and I have to run after him through multiple airports. No stopping for food! No stopping for crying! No stopping for selfies! Must sit at the gate for at least an hour before boarding!) by reminding him we have nowhere to be. The message did not however get passed to the woman behind us who is sighing. Now, I understand coming off an international flight to stand in line can make us into the worst version of ourselves. I, however, a seasoned traveler am calm and lovely. Then we are next and the lady behind us yells “that one is open.” I say calmly and with all dignity and grace “umm he is waving to someone in that line” to which she responds a little louder, “NO! The other one!”  Deciding not to get into a jetlag-induced fistfight we scuttle off to the “open” customs officer who looks at us with contempt. “I was waving to someone from that line.” I try to laugh it off and explain the passenger behind us told us to come here to which she responds, “Ah, the passengers told you what to do.” She is not impressed so after a few more nervous laughs and twenty minutes loading our gargantuan bags on and off the x-ray machine, (because pissing off a customs officer is a surefire way to get put through the “needs inspection line”)  we head out into the dark 5:20am air.

Pushing our carts, we follow Al-who parked the car. He leads until we are standing in the middle of a busy road dodging buses and cars when I decide to take over and lead us to a cross walk. As we enter the parking lot, I sense there is a problem as Alan is not heading in any particular direction but proceeds as if shopping for a used car. “Where is the car?” I ask, making sure I keep the panic in my voice to a minimum (you know, because I am a seasoned traveler, calm and lovely) until he says "ummm." Then I become the raving lunatic bag lady, literally, pushing bags up and down the aisle mumbling, "I can’t believe this!" and yelling "where is it?" not caring that there are other crazed 5am people around and they could get the wrong impression about me… We go up and down each aisle, Amelia dodging in and out of parked cars declaring every thirty seconds that she found it but has apparently forgotten what our car looks like. Fifteen minutes in, I yell across the parking lot (my previous ability to be calm vanished), “Al – I need you to stop and try to remember what happened when you parked the car!” To which he responds, “ummm…” I start to unravel as we wander into yet another parking lot. I am convinced no one could completely forget where we parked the car so I stand still right in the middle and declare loudly that the car has been stolen. We finally find it with me mumbling some cutting remarks about being so forgetful. Then we drive home and stumble into the house, finding it unexpectedly warm and welcoming… I had forgotten to turn the heater off. As we anticipate the gargantuan power bill, I have to wonder, where was the meticulous angry old lady when we were leaving three weeks before? I’ll tell you where: NAPPING because she had kept me up all night worrying about whether or not I had packed socks.