We become alarmed

"It is perfectly normal," says the medical correspondent on the TV program I watch 3 days a week for the 10 minutes I spend lifting weights at the YMCA while the aerobics class I attend does balancing exercises. I suppose I need the balancing exercises as much as I need to lift weights, but some of them are uncomfortable to do on certain joints so I skip them.

She is a younger middle-aged woman who exudes confidence as she assures us that forgetting where one has put the car keys is just part of normal aging, it's not incipient Alzheimer disease.

Terry Pratchett, who is one of my favorite authors, has Alzheimer disease. I admit, this disease scares the crap out of me -- even more than cancer.

The problem, she says, is when we forget why we have car keys. This is a big relief. I don't misplace the car keys because they are either hanging on the frog hook my sister gave me or else they are in the car. But I do misplace my glasses. Often. But at least I still know what glasses are for and why I have them: I can't read unless I have them on. And as soon as I finish reading whatever it is I am reading, I take them off and set them down.

I have many more than just one set of glasses. I have two pairs at the computer -- my fancy optometrist-prescribed computer glasses and the pair of drug-store readers I had been using but find I still need (I goofed when I told the optometrist what I wanted, but that's another story) These never ever leave my computer desk, so I always know where they are.

The problem is the several other pairs of store-bought readers that are scattered about the house. When I remember, I hook the earpiece part over the neck of my shirt so I don't have to wander around the house looking for the missing glasses.

The other day I forgot they were hanging from my shirt and went searching for them, and then noted that I had two pairs of glasses hanging from my shirt.

Richard keeps a little notebook in the pocket of his t-shirt so he can write down things he needs to remember to do, right then.

But an even handier device is the alarm program that we have both installed on our computers.

Richard has his set for all sorts of things, and it goes off periodically throughout the day. It's very obnoxious, but also effective. The other day, I used my alarm to remind me to call my brother on his birthday.




Only I was off by one day.