Alzheimer’s light

Alzheimer’s light is what I’ve heard it called. The ability that is, to forget where things are, when things are and even what things are.
My particular specialty is to spend an inordinate amount of time looking for things that are not lost. I have simply just temporarily forgotten where they are, where I put them or to whom it is that I have lent them.
This week for example I have spent fruitless, frustrating hours trying to track down a number of DVD’s that I have collected over the years that were borrowed from me and never returned. “Why don’t you keep list?” people ask when I try to track down borrowed items that have not been returned. I did once but I lost the list, so that clearly is not the solution.
The problem is trust. We don’t really, in the polite chattering classes, want to admit that we don’t trust our friends and acquaintances. Even though we may not. It’s somehow a bit off to offer to lend a book, CD or DVD to someone then imply that you don’t trust them to return it so you are going to write their name down with a list of the items they have borrowed so you can stalk them even unto their graves until they, or their estate, returns them to you.
It’s far more acceptable to say, with a happy laugh, “of course you will return them won’t you,” and they say, “yes of course we will” and the conversation moves on even as they slide your treasured items into their possession.
A friend told me this week of a prominent media personality who used to steal CD’s from him by “borrowing” them when he was not looking — and never returning them. His solution was simply to visit the offending party and steal his own CD’s back.
He could do that because he knew who had taken them. With Alzheimer’s Light, that’s not an option.
Also my trouble is that I like to share. If I have bought a great DVD, or CD or book, I want my friends to watch it, listen to it or to read it and I want to discuss it with them. So when they visit I reach up to my shelves and say, “Here, read this, watch this, or listen to this… yes of course you can take it home I know you will give it back.”
And it’s my loss that I don’t have the courage, upon their receipt of the said article, to whip out a pen and paper and catalogue their name and contact number like cop writing out a fine.
I trust my friends and by default their friends but I wish I had listened to my mother. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”, she said. That advice, sadly, like so many other applications our parents taught, to smooth our way from tottler to toppie, went in one ear and out the next.
* By the way, thanks to my fellow Boomers who e-mailed me the titles of the books that graced the sagging shelves of their youth. In addition to those mentioned in my last column such as the Art of Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance, the Whole Earth Catalogue etc, were Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (thanks John) the Little Prince, the Prophet, Kahlil Gibran, Knots by RD Laing, Games People play by Eric Berne, MD, Hawaii by James A. Michener, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Linda Goodman's Love Signs and not to forget, the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. Yes?
Sadly I don’t have any of them anymore. I must have lent them to someone I trusted. (Sigh)