Channeling Norman Thayer

In the 1990's, when I lived in Arizona, I used to skydive. Yes, it's true: for about two years every other week or so I'd go to a drop zone, spend too much money, and throw myself out of an airplane at an altitude of 13,000 feet. It was lots of fun.

One time, I was practicing back-flips in the air. I exited the plane and was falling through the sky. Freestyle skydiving was the New Thing, and I was practicing something called a stag pose (one foot down, one foot back, arms out in what I think was supposed to look like deer antlers). Then it was time for a back-flip. "Okay!" I said to myself. "I'm going to do a back-flip." I continued to fall through the air in a box stance. "Back-flip!" I had just practiced them on the ground twenty minutes ago. "No. Really; I'm going to do a back-flip now." And then the most curious thing happened.

A strong mental image appeared before my eyes, momentarily blocking out the Tucson mountains and the sun and the moon and the wispy clouds. In my mind's eye, I saw a string trailing along the ground--it disappeared into a dark hole.  I continued to fall a mile a minute through the sky.  Okay, I thought, I'm going to file this away for later and go back to stag poses.

On the ground, of course, I knew that jerking my knees to my chest in free-fall would cause a back-flip.  The next time around, I managed to one.  Memory and thinking were different while skydiving; I used to call time spent in free-fall "jumping into my sky-mind."  I think my sky-mind was using the image to say, "Look, I don't know what this phrase your saying means, so I'm going to use the symbol of strings into darkness to tell you."  Sometimes I could remember dreams of skydiving more clearly than actually skydiving.

Fast forward to 2018.  We were going to beach for the weekend. I volunteered to drive the first fairly straight part, from Eugene to Corvallis, because the winding coastal mountain roads bothers Mark's stomach less if he drives them. We had a short discussion about the merits of taking I-5 verses Highway 99W.

I got behind the wheel of our new car and adjusted the mirrors. It's different from the smaller car I've been driving for the last fifteen years. The newer car doesn't have a parking break lever: it's got a toggle that you have to press down to release the break or pull up to set--if I pretend the toggle switch is a break lever I can keep the break settings straight. It doesn't have an analogue speedometer dial: instead, it's got a digital readout. The clock is in the upper right-hand corner of a LCD screen instead of centered over an analog radio-CD player combo. The new car's body is just a little wider and longer than the old car, and the hood sits in a valley between two large headlight bulges--so there's a wider blind spot along the front sides of the car than I'm used to.

None of this is bad, only different--like wearing boots after wearing flip-flops. But it meant I'm thinking about how to drive the car instead of automatically driving it, sort of like thinking of e a c h  l e t t e r   i n   t h i s   s e n t e n c e   as I type it instead of wiggling my fingers and having whole words and phrases magically appear.

I signal, pull out, drive about a half block to a stop sign, and realize that A) I know I want to drive to Corvallis, but that B) I can't remember which way to turn to begin a trip I've made twelve times a year for the last twenty years. Some crossing pedestrians buy me time, and I play the journey backwards in my head, starting at Corvallis and heading past the airport toward Eugene. I can see a stretch of Highway 99W in my mind's eye, but I can't stitch the path from where I'm currently at a stop sign to the place on the highway. I tried again, and I get farther, to the Expressway, but I was still having an "A to B, B to C, therefore A to C" disconnect.

"Um," I said. "I've forgotten how to get to Corvallis." I heard those words come out of my mouth and tried not to freak out. "Which way do I turn?" Both ways seem equally wrong somehow. I'm hoped that going through the motions will jump-start the procedure.

"Are you impaired?" Mark asks. "Can you drive?"

"I'm fine," I said, although I felt like an Alzheimer's patent. "I just need to know which way to go."

"Turn left," he said, and I did. There was no resultant ah-ha moment as I drove along the street (in hindsight, we were facing east instead of west and I would have turned right then right again).

I played the travel tape in my head backward once more and the topology of the valley unfolded in my head like the full, four-part chorus of a song--but I needed to sing the opening verse, and I couldn't recall the first words.

I tried to recall harder, and the image of a dark hole opened up in my mind, with strings or highways disappearing into them.

I pulled the car to the side. "I still can't remember."

Mark and I traded spots, and as he took his usual route (I've never understood why he takes this particular way), I watched, and waited a few blocks for recognition. It's not exactly an ah-ha moment, more like a oh-right with a whole lot of "Holy crap, I'm going to become one of those Old People Who Have To Be Driven Everywhere Because They Get Lost And Had Their Driver's License Revoked." Before I'm 55.

Crap. Is this Golden Pond Norman Thayer Moment early-onset Alzheimer's? Is Mark going to have to watch over me so I don't wander? Should I send him away on a cool vacation now while I can still function on my own? Should I arrange a companion for him now so I can go into a Happy Memories Fake Village knowing he'll be with someone?  (My friend Ellen laughed and said "How like a Capricorn to order someone else's life from an old folk's home" when I shared this with her.)  Can I even afford a Happy Memories Fake Village from age 55 onward? Damn, how long did Terry Pratchett have to live once he got Alzheimer's? Damn, damn, damn.

Except... that string into a shadow image felt more like that sky-diving moment than like being lost. I knew where I was--but I was stuck trying to find the starting point in the procedure... sort of like getting stuck thinking too hard about the difference between the clutch, the brake, and the gas.

Maybe this is a Frankie from Grace and Frankie style stroke. Except that I can smile on both sides of my face and raise both arms. And I'm not a 80-something Lillian Tomlin.

Maybe it was state-dependent learning--a new environment (and starting east instead of west) interfered with the recall of a normally automatic behavior. Maybe thinking about driving instead of simply driving resulted in "choking" on automatic behavior. I'm going with this explanation, because the others rattle the hell out of me. When I correctly remembered when we hit the coastal highway in Philomath at 13th street, I felt a little better.

At a stop a couple of hours later, I thanked Mark for driving and he brushed it off with a "You've always had difficulties going places." (This is true; my Adventures in Geographical Impairment are a source of frequent mirth). "You're old, you had a brain-fart." And then he followed it up with a comparison between the look on my face and that of my Grandmother in one of her less lucid moments.  (Which made me feel oh-so-sexy....)

The next day, I drove us back home. Because I could. Because when you fall off a horse, you have to get back on.  And the next day after that, I'm drove the old car around Eugene and thought, cautiously, "Yeah. It was the car."