As one gets older, they say, the memory is the second thing to go.
The first thing to go, of course, is the memory.
So I’m having a conversation with my friend Eric. The topic is (surprise) Marx Brothers movies, specifically some of the later ones, and I’m looking for a certain descriptive word, and unbidden, from deep within the “These Words Aren’t Even On The SAT Anymore” vault, here it comes:
“Pastiche”.
He stops.
I stop.
“I think that’s the right word,” I say. We both go to the dictionary to look it up.
As it happens, it was exactly the word I’d been looking for, down to the shadings and implications. We’re talking dead center of the bullseye here.
If someone had asked me what that word meant meant five minutes before our conversation, I couldn’t have told them.
And now I am most fraught.
How did I know that word? And what the hell else do I know that I don’t know about?
And do I really not know these things, or am I just keeping them a secret from me?