Slip-Slidin’ Away

 

You might remember this 1975 song by Paul Simon? (If not, it’s easy to find on YouTube.)

As I was thinking about it today, I was lamenting my current physical and mental condition and one especially deleterious effect it has had: forgetting.

Just a couple of years ago I had, firmly stored in my memory vault, about 230 poems I'd memorized over the years. I was able to trot them out and annoy friends and family all the time. (I took some pleasure in that, actually—the annoyance.)

It was a bit of work to keep them stored. I had a schedule I adhered to rigorously. I had a set of poems I said on my daily walks to and from the coffee shop, some I mumbled at the coffee shop, sets I mumbled various days at the health club (M-W-F, TU-TH-SAT). I had a set I rehearsed in the morning in the shower (I know, I know).

And so I was able to keep them all in my head.

But my New Life is different: I don't walk or go to the coffee shop; I can't go to the health club.

That leaves home, where I do my best—but just don't have the energy to do them all. Not nearly.

I try to keep the long, complex ones that took me so long to learn ("Kubla Khan," "Renascence," poems by Auden and E. E. Cummings, et al.), but some of the others have been slip-slidin' away the past couple of years.

I do have a complete list I keep on my computer so my survivors will know all that my dead head used to hold. Maybe they’ll be impressed. Maybe depressed.  (Why did he waste his time doing that?!)

One comforting thing I have learned over the years: Poems I learned long ago (and forgot) returned quickly when I re-memorized them. “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” for example, which I learned back at Adams Elementary School in Enid, OK, leapt back into my head when I began rehearsing it. As did the opening lines of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (Hiram High School).

A bit of consolation, I guess.

And I’d wager that most of you who’d loved that 1975 Simon song could not remember all the lyrics now, but if you look at them/listen to the song, they’ll return as quickly as a boomerang.

And to make it easier for you, here’s a link to Simon singing it!