August 18, 2015: Losing my mind

     We are gifted with but one body, and that body contains just one brain. That's probably a good thing, since I can't imagine having two or more brains competing for the use of the one body. When I reached my forties, I started having trouble with memory issues. In my early twenties, I played in a couple of rock bands as served as the leader for those groups. I would sit down at my stereo and listen to a potential song over and over until I knew all of the parts for all of the instruments. I would then go and teach the drummer his part, the bass player his part, and the lead guitarist his part, while I played the rhythm guitar and sang lead. I retained all four parts and the words of over 200 songs that I could tap into at any time.
     Then I hit my forties, and suddenly I found myself forgetting the most rudimentary things, like phone numbers, addresses, and even the names of people close to me. It was scary, and I did consult a doctor. He told me that it was not Alzheimer's as I originally feared, but was most likely stress related. I have found that it comes and goes through my life, sometimes allowing me to recite passages of the Bible without fault and other times not allowing me to remember the name of my twelve year old granddaughter. It is something that I have accepted, and those close to me understand that it is not an indication of a lack of feelings for the ones whose names I forget.
     Computers are like that, with a very important difference. We can back up the memory of a computer, and if it fails, we can restore it to the state it was in when the backup occurred. I suffered the crash and total loss of everything that was on my laptop earlier this year when a hard drive that had given me no indication of a problem suddenly just quit working completely. To my dismay, a portion of my writing and the last four years of my income tax files were lost and irretrievable despite the best efforts of my two computer gurus, Matt Denney and Bobby Brown. They are fine men, and if they tell you that something cannot be fixed, you can trust what they say completely. My hard drive was replaced and I rebuilt my desktop from scratch, loading everything that I use daily and spending two weeks in the process.
     The computer has served me well in the time since that rebuild, but in recent days, I would turn it on and it would not load. I thought it was a hard drive problem again, but after Matt did some research on it, he found that this was a recurring problem for this model, and it was tracked to the mother board almost all of the time. He is still looking at it, but most likely, I will have to buy a new laptop and do another rebuild. The difference between what happened earlier this year and what happened this time is that I started a serious regiment of backing up my computers and keeping multiple copies of all my important documents on my laptop, my desktop, and my tablet. Nothing was lost this time except maybe a couple of sentences of a story that I am working on for publication. Easily replaced.
     It may surprise you to hear me say this, but there will be a time when we as humans will have our memory restored to fullness once again. I'm not talking about one of my science fiction story lines, but rather in the next life, when we will be fully restored and made new. I have reached out to a lot of people in my life, offering help whenever I could, and I look forward to seeing those folks again and learning what they did with their lives. The great thing about it is that I will be able to remember their names, and all the experiences we had together.
     I lost my mother when I was just twenty-five, and something that troubles me and many other people is that as time passes, we can't remember the sound of our loved ones' voices. I thought that I would never forget such a thing, but there it is, and try as I might, I can't remember her voice. It is such a shame to lose something that was once so dear. In a crowded room, I could always pick out her words, and it gave me a deep sense of comfort to know that she was nearby.
     It will come back one day, and I expect that she will be one of the first to greet me in that life. In the meantime, I have to rely on keepsakes and mementos that I can physically hold to remind me of the important things in my life. Fortunately, my mind does still function on other levels, or this page would just be a series of random letters that made no sense....