How Do You Spell Toilet?

I'm trying to remember.......

Many of us seniors unfortunately have had direct personal experience with cognitive decline in friends or relatives. It appears that as our population ages, the incidence of dementia is increasing. The reasons for this discouraging statistic are probably multifactorial and are largely unknown.

As we all age, it is not unusual to observe some difficulty remembering words or names. In most forms of dementia, our ability to process new items into our short-term memory is the first to go. Our long-term memory will often remains intact for years even after the signs of true cognitive decline have become obvious.

I have noticed that as I’ve gotten older, my memory for details from my childhood have remained clear, but if you ask me to name the movie that I watched the night before, I am stumped. I always tell friends that I am their best audience for their jokes, because I will laugh as if I had never heard them before.

In a recent conversation with my sister who is a few years older, we were both amazed that we could remember things from our very early childhood. We both could remember our party-line phone number from the early 1950s. Most people state that their long-term memory dates back to when they were around four years old.

The other day, while in a doctor’s office, I happened to notice one of my earliest memories. I was a very early reader and I can remember that I told my mother that I knew how to spell toilet: B-E-M-I-S.

Another early mis-read was the Roman letters on the front of the library in my hometown, Verona, New Jersey. The letters read, “VERONA PVBLIC LIBRARY” which I would insist on reading as “P-Viblic.”

Now that I’m well into my 70s, I’m doing everything humanly possible to keep my memory clear. My wife and I eat mostly organic, avoid all processed foods, cook all our meals, and we avoid the inflammatory seed oils. We also do some form of exercise every day including yoga, walking, biking and kayaking. And to avoid the dread of cognitive decline, I try to maintain my French and Spanish fluency by speaking to my language partners in France and Argentina every week.

I’m hoping that I’ll continue to stay healthy both physically and mentally.