Some time in the early morning — maybe 2, maybe 3, I wasn’t going to look at the clock because I didn’t want to know what time it was — I found myself thinking about United States ice dancing teams.
I don’t know what thought chain got me to that but there I was, and found I couldn’t remember the names of one particular team I’d loved, who’d skated and won gold medals in the 2000s.
So flopping around in bed, struggling either to get to sleep or, defeated by that goal, to remember the names. I could see both their faces — she was blond and beautiful, he was Latino and handsome. How long did I take my brain to cough up his last name, which is Agosto?
But I couldn’t get anywhere near the woman’s name.
“I’ll google this tomorrow,” I promised myself. Which should have done the trick, except then I started thinking about our championship team which succeeded Agosto and…Her.
This morning, even before I brushed my teeth, I went to work and found them: Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto.
Later, when I visited my email, I found what follows, sent to me by my clairvoyant friend Susan:
I read this in a book recently and thought it was delightful. It is the response by an elderly woman when asked whether she remembered something (she didn’t):
“These days, I have to put in requests to my brain, as one does at the library, and then a little worker takes my slip and disappears into the stacks. It may take him a while, but he always comes back with the goods.”
That’s it.