Alan S. Oser

The elderly are so aware of their frailties that they often fail to appreciate their advantages. One of these is freedom from the fear of embarrassment. I no longer feel the slightest loss of aplomb, for example, when my reply to the question "Where were you last night?" has to be "I forget." In former days my forgetfulness might shock the questioner. Now it merely produces sympathetic amusement.

Although last night may be a mystery, I remember a good many events long past. The placid American life, the one that came through the disasters of the 20th century unscathed, is in retrospect a succession of incidents, many of them occurring in family life or at work. Those events or words that cling to my conscious memory may or may not have been of great moment in my life.

It is the minor incidents that inspire my wonder. Why do I remember them?

Why do I remember surreptitiously tying the strings of Brian Landis’s apron to the handle of a silverware drawer behind his back while he studiously attended to the teacher’s lecture in our sixth-grade cooking class at Public School 101 some sixty-five years ago? Brian suddenly stood up, yanking out the drawer and bringing the silverware down with a crash. The teacher, absorbed in a sauce recipe, never heard a thing.

The truth is that episodes of embarrassment, disappointment and disillusionment, whether major or minor, survive quite well in my memory. The major ones I have re-interpreted to permit peace and contentment in recollection. The minor ones can be left pure in the memory to be exploited by a sense of humor. The moments of triumph, if there were any, elude easy recollection.

To recall to memory major setbacks for which it is clear that no one but oneself is to blame is not a happy endeavor. Fortunately I have never run over a pedestrian while driving a car. I have not set our house on fire by some act of negligence (although I have come close). Sure, I can remember some incidents, but why dwell on them?

At least I was not so incautious as my friend Lenny at Coast Guard Officers Candidate School in New London, Conn. in 1953. Starting a weekend leave, he changed from his uniform to a bathing suit in the rear of an open convertible while his girlfriend sat in the passenger seat and the car was parked outside the Commanding Officer’s quarters. The Commanding Officer observed the scene from his second-floor window. He was not amused.

Lenny was on the verge of being thrown out of Officers Candidate School. A letter of apology to the Commanding Officer was required. I wrote it and Lenny signed it. He survived in OCS and attributed his survival to my prose. Later, he coached me for the final examination in a gunnery course, and saved my own Coast Guard career. All this seemed quite major at the time.

It was certainly not major, however, when the bridge columnist of The Staten Island Advance wrote a column about my partner Terence Benbow and me, occasional participants in a local duplicate bridge competition. I still have the yellowed clipping in a manila folder in my files. It reports approvingly on my play of a certain hand – the only hand with a successful outcome that I can recall play by play in my entire bridge career.

The display of skill in an activity in which one is not expected to excel is exactly the type of event that I am likely to remember. And a blunder in an activity in which one believes one does excel will affix itself to memory like a barnacle. That form of a blunder can be a powerful blow to self-esteem.

How can I interpret, in retrospect, the undeniable fact that in changing a rather large headline at The New York Times under heavy deadline pressure before an edition went to press I misspelled the word “exuberance” as “exhuberance”? That I can’t spell? Never! That I am overconfident about my spelling ability? Probably.

Overconfidence led me on another occasion to change the name of a clothing store in Winthrop, Maine, to “Grant’s” from “Wilson’s” in a reporter’s copy, thereby forcing the Times to run one of the several corrections necessitated by my writing and editing efforts over the years. Since I had frequently patronized that store in Winthrop as a summer visitor to Maine, I was certain I could trust my memory. Wrong again.

It is hard for the elderly to recognize memory for the trickster it is. My poor father had slipped well down the hill by the time he was 85. He accepted the fact that he could no longer drive safely. What he could not accept was his inability to serve as a reliable navigator while I was at the wheel. He insisted on giving directions. This meant making wrong turns and getting lost on Sunday afternoon spins through neighborhoods that were once familiar to him. To contradict him was to anger him. I assumed he was suffering from incipient dementia, but that did not explain my own self-deceptions in my mid-50’s.

The skill that does improve as the years advance is the ability to view past failures in a light more favorable to oneself. If I was turned down for several jobs I sought, it was not, as I thought at the time, because of professional shortcoming on my part. It was because my job application was ill timed from the employer’s point of view. If I failed to win prizes for professional performance, as colleagues seemed to do with some regularity, it was because of the nature of my work. While solid reporting enabled others to expose malfeasance by public officials, I wrote admiringly of real estate developers who built projects that nearby neighbors loathed.

One polishes one’s memory as years pass, giving past events a more pleasant glow. I no longer take seriously the ambitions of my youth. I might have had enough ability to achieve at least some of them. But I’ve now decided that doing so would have meant too great a sacrifice for my family. That conclusion comforts me when I recall that the newspaper I wrote to in Kenya in the nineteen-fifties, asking for a job, never answered my letter. Had I gone to Africa, my wife might never have had her own career. As it happened, she eventually became a lawyer and by retirement was earning more than I was.

That is the kind of memory I like to retain, and I do.