Look, it’s not as if I haven’t given it a fair shake, but this whole calendar thing just isn’t working out for me.
It first hit home with me four or five years ago, when Mom spun down the steps, caromed off the tree and nailed her landing on the lawn. My wife and I were with her in the emergency room when the doctor asked her a few questions just to see how jumbled her brain might be.
“Do you know what today’s date is?” the doctor asked.
My wife and I stared at each other in panic.
He’s asking today’s date to test normal brain functions? Who could possibly know trivia like that without first checking a newspaper or a cell-phone screen? And then only if you were given enough time to track down your reading glasses. Better reserve a suite for the whole family, Doc.
I might do O.K. with the month, if you gave me enough time to recall how long “Christmas ornaments” has been on my chores list, and whether in the “get out” or “put away” column.
But today’s date? The day, month and year? You might as well ask me the square root of my age—which, by the way, requires enough adding and subtracting to remember as it is.
Mom gave some kind of answer, and my wife and I stared at the doc to see if we should be worried. If I had taken the fall she had taken, I probably would have guessed it was the 42nd of Febaugber. But her answer sounded better.
The Doc smiled.
“She got it right,” I ventured, and the Doc nodded. “I knew that,” I added, and he shot me a sidelong glance. Liars always say too much.
After that, I tried to make it a point to always know what the date was, just in case I was called on to perform triage on somebody after a good head-bonking, but it was no use. It’s hard enough to remember all those numbers when you’re cursing the T.V. for not showing their regular Tuesday night programming—until somebody reminds you that Tuesday was two days ago.
Oh, there are some dates I remember. My birthday. And my wife’s birthday. You can’t get medical treatment without knowing those dates. And our anniversary, which I make a point of remembering to avoid needing medical treatment. We got married on Flag Day, so give me two points for that.
But day-to-day dates? Sorry, I don’t roll that way.
I remember some dates if something important happened on it. Take 9/11, for example. Everyone remembers that date.
But ask me what year that fateful 9/11 happened? I always have to get the rusty brain gears grinding to come up with that.
I recall it was a beautiful Tuesday morning, and all air traffic was suspended for the rest of the week. That was memorable because I had lived in the shadow of O’Hare Airport for all my life, which means there was always a plane in the sky somewhere. But not this September, in the year…nope, not there yet.
The following Sunday after that horrible 9/11, I was driving down the expressway in my Chrysler convertible with the top down, when I saw that first beautiful jet reclaiming the blue sky with no car roof above me to block the view. Who could forget a moment like that?
That convertible was a rolling disaster—well, it was a Chrysler, after all—and it died on me that winter. I went out and bought a new 2002 Honda CRV to replace it. So that means the September before must have been in…2001!
Of course! You’d be drain-bamaged not to know that!
You want me to tell you the year of that record-breaking cold winter in Chicago? Easy.
Our son had just been born, and we moved our growing family to a bigger house with an unfinished basement. We had a New Year’s Eve “house-warming” party down there that first winter with the fireplace going, and the moisture of all those breathing people froze in a glistening glaze on the cement walls, which convinced us to finish the basement the following summer. So the only winter we had an unfinished basement in that house was our son’s first winter—the winter of 1976-77!
Simple!
You ask me what year Martin Luther King was murdered?
Well, I had just pulled my red-and-white 1962 Chevy II into the Clark station in Macomb, Ill., where I went to college, and I went inside to buy a pack of Marlboros. There I heard people talking about the news on the radio above the cash register. I went back to the dorm to call my girlfriend and tell her. We got married in 1969, so if I called from a dorm it had to be earlier than that, and she convinced me to quit, so if I was buying smokes and calling the girl who wasn’t yet my wife, it had to be…1968!
Of course!
• Author, musician, and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
