the “up” side of short-term memory loss

Ruth eavesdrops. Always has, always will. She also opens my mail sometimes. My daddy will be dead 20 years ago the 16th of this month so I’ve had plenty of time to adjust to Momma’s strangely obtrusive yet endearing ways. Rob and I share our 100 year old house with her. She sleeps downstairs. We’re upstairs with a den, two bedrooms and a bathroom that was obviously once a bedroom. It’s big enough to contain a cast-iron claw-foot tub and a large separate shower. You could put a kindergarten class down for a nap on the remaining floorspace. Momma spends time standing at the bottom of the stairs; her head cocked to one side like an innocent little puppy as she strains to hear our conversations. Old Eagle Ears I call her. The good news: “Mother hasn’t lost her hearing and she’s ninety!” The bad news: “Mother hasn’t lost her hearing.”
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Curious George hovers at doorways listening to the conversation before entering the room. Since her bedroom is on the other side of the living room wall, we’ve become quite adept at the almost-whisper level of conversation. She’ll say, “I just want to give you two some time alone! You and Rob deserve a few minutes to yourselves in the evening! When your father came home, I used to fix us both a drink and shoo you kids outside so we could have some time alone!” (This was the 1960s, she meant a martini or a vodka gimlet… not sweet tea. Momma is not southern, she and Daddy drank highballs. I am the only one in our family raised in the south, curiously enough, having moved here at age six.)

But we don’t have time alone, we have Ruth standing just out of eye-shot. While it took some getting used to, now we smile and realize it is who she is. My grandmother was 42 when Momma was born. The youngest of four siblings who was more than 15 years younger than her brother — of course she grew up eavesdropping!

So here’s the thing I figured out today. We don’t need to speak in low voices anymore. Momma has very little, if any, short-term memory. I mean, she remembers that she ate breakfast but it’s not important to recall what she ate for breakfast — not to her anyway. Details of daily life are trivial and not worth consideration or discussion. Right now, all of her RAM is consumed with 60gigs of her WWII experiences, Civil War stories from my grandfather, discussions of Emmanuel Swedenborg’s influence on my great-great grandfather, and revelations concerning the significance of traveling down some of life’s more obscure frontage roads — there’s no room for the storage of my discussion about mortgage payments and utility bills. This is the simple joy of being 90. The mundane ceases to exist, the daily plethora of living takes place without notice.

“Speak freely,” I tell people when they visit, “she won’t remember your conversation by dinner time.” It’s really kind of nice. Momma is aging gracefully. She’s low maintenance and a great storyteller. And she does dishes… her own laundry… lets the dogs out into the backyard every morning at 6:00 a.m. when she steps out to the back porch for a cigarette and cup of coffee. So what if she listens in on our conversations? First off, we’ve got nothing to hide and secondly… well, see the previous paragraph.