What’s your name, again?
January 26, 2007 by Organic Mama
There’s a woman who jogs by my house, on a corner of two sidewalk-less country roads, every single day, even when it is stupid cold. If I am outside with the puppy, she and I wave at each other as she plods by. She’s a lovely lady, a blonde woman in her early 40s, with whom I have had several lengthy, fabulous and wide-ranging conversations. I know she is renovating her house up the road, that our daughters are in the same grade at school and that she used to teach photography at a local college. Thing is, I cannot remember her name. She has told me her name twice before and now I am feeling quite like an imbecile - it is Donna? Sharon? LInda?
It galls me that I seem to have a sieve at the back of my mind that retains the trivial, day-to-day stuff, but discards the names of the people that populate my world. Last year when I was interning at a high school, it took my nearly three weeks to get all 17 names of my freshmen down and I still made mistakes. I know Pam at the local grocery store but she wears a name tag, as does Bob at the post office. It’s forgetting the names of the neighbors I chat with as we walk dogs by the other’s homes, who I would not be able to call out to if my house was on fire, that I worry about.
For this reason, I have done a little research on tricks to use to hold onto names that would otherwise slide out of my brain (where most of them spend too little time anyway) into oblivion. Apparently, Franklin Roosevelt used to amaze people by recalling, without misstep, every one of his many staff members’ names; he used to imagine that he wrote their names on their foreheads as he met them! Taking that a step further, one of the net experts recommends that you use a particular favorite color of imaginary forehead ink. So, from now on, I am going to pretend to write the names of the folks I meet in big blue letters on their heads.
Now if that nice lady would only jog by when I am at my mailbox, slow down enough to let me embarass myself my inquiring about her name and then stand still long enough for me to write on her…
Write her name on her ass as she jogs away. I bet it’ll work.
Here in NYC there are these things called “off leash hours” where, in parks and designated areas, one’s dog can play off leash with other dogs. Your dog gets exercise but you don’t have to! We two legged freaks generally stand around and chat with eachother. In this way you can get to know someone really very well, exchange weirdly intimate details. There’s a catch, though, there’s this odd unwritten rule where you ask the name of the person’s dog but not their own name. It’s actually a weird sociological phenom where getting to know the human’s name is a whole new big step in your relationship with them.
People are nutty.
I think I will try that!!
I loved those parks - we had them in WA state and in Phoenix, but don’t have them out here.
It’s funny, Kizz, I DO know the names of the dogs in the neighborhood better than the humans. There’s a male German Shepherd named Shultz who comes by every morning around 7:30. I don’t know how but Shem, my 3-yr old male, can sense his approach (as he stalks the front window) when he isn’t even visible. Shem then loses his mind and barks, whines and makes Wookie noises until the big black and brown dog is off the property. I haven’t got a clue what the nice man who owns Shultz is called. It hasn’t occurred to me to ask!