In central Indiana. This would have been in the 1970s, in the early elementary grades when you’re first learning to read and write. “Wh” was taught as part of the set of digraphs: ch, ph, sh, th, and wh. In each case, the presence of the “h” changes the pronunciation of the letter before it.
Nevermind
…is almost 33 years old now! Can you believe it?
[/Old-personism]
I have officially reached the age where I can no longer put on a pair of pants without sitting down. The days of standing on one leg while I try to hit the leghole with my other foot are past. Too many close calls where I end up hopping around the room on one foot, crashing into furniture and scrambling to avoid a fall. Now I sit on edge of the bed, slip both feet through the legs of the pants, then stand and pull them up.
You, too? Should we get little buttons, to let us identify each other?
Way too hard to fasten with my stiff fingers.
Hats? Oddly patterned socks?
Get off my Lawn pins?
What the hell is a lawn pin?
What?
Oh. Never mind.
Not sure if this is quite an old-personism, since I think I’ve done this occasionally for years…but I just sat down and our cat jumped up in my lap. I told him “don’t get too comfy; I have to get back up in a binute”— I mangled up “in a bit” and “in a minute”.
The cat was nice enough to pretend he didn’t hear it.
I learned the “wh” thing in the '60s in the Chicago suburbs. Back then, the teachers were really sticklers about proper grammar and pronunciation.
Lately I have found myself narrating my life. By which I mean that when I get up to do something I will tell myself what I’m going to be doing. “I’m going to go to the bathroom, then I’m going to make a cup of coffee, get a snack bar, and go back to the office and check my emails.” Or I’ll talk about what my options are for lunch or dinner, or whether it’s too early to go out to check the mailbox.
You’re trying to remind yourself so you don’t forget half those tasks while doing the first of them.
Do not ask me how I know. I’ll have forgotten the answer.
What I’m concerned about is that I never used to do this, but now I do it all the time. What concerns me is that I recently saw something about Alzheimer’s patients relying on notes to remind them of things they need to do, and I’m wondering if this is my brain doing the same thing.
I’ve made lists my entire life. They are essential when you start coaching, cooking or doing anything more complicated than sleeping.
Everybody uses notes to remind them of what they need to do (that’s pretty much what a calendar is for ) and I suspect most people of all ages do what you do when they want to do more than one thing. I don’t have to remind myself to go to the bathroom or get coffee or check the mailbox but if I want to do all three, there’s a good chance I will forget one without narrating in my head. And that’s been true probably since I was 30.
Anyway, the way I’ve heard it is that everyone forgets where they left their keys from time to time. The problem is when you forget what keys are for.
Another reason for my brain deciding to start doing this may be because it’s tired of having me sit down and then remember that there was something I had needed to do while I was up. And with the current state of my knees it’s a literal pain to have to get up again to do it.
I recently had a brief hospital stay over a blood sugar crisis (I have reactive hypoglycemia). When a young nurse-- but not that young-- late 20s, or even 30, was taking my blood pressure, and the news came back that I was positive for strep, but negative for COVID and flu, I mentioned that I’d been vaccinated for COVID and flu. She asked me whether I’d had a couple of other vaccines, and I said I’d had EVERY vaccine-- I’d had chicken pox and Hib, because I got them in the army, and I’d even had TB.
She was curious about that, and I said it was for travel when I was a kid, and I wondered if a vaccine from that long ago was still effective, so she asked about it-- how old I was, and where I’d gone.
I told her I’d lived in the Soviet Union when I was 10. Then I asked her if she even knew what the Soviet Union was. This is someone with a college degree, bear in mind.
She said “It was somewhere in Russia, wasn’t it?”
I laughed, which probably wasn’t nice of me, but it was so funny to me.
Sorry for the hijack, but had to share the funny.
You’re really old when you think, “I used to be a Goldwater Republican. WHAT was I thinking?”
Someday I want to say What in tarnation is going on here.