when you can’t remember

      My phone is missing.

      I’m in the car, getting ready to meet someone for lunch and do some errands, and I had had the phone, just a moment ago, and now I can’t find it. It was right there in my right-side front pocket, where it always is, and now it’s gone. And I have no idea where it’s gone to.  

      I get out of the car, go back in the house, and go into the kitchen, where I had just been before getting out of the house and into the car. The phone isn’t there. I go upstairs to the bedroom, where I had been before I had been in the kitchen, and the phone isn’t there either.

      It isn’t anywhere.  

      I’m getting late for my lunch so I give up, for the moment, really frustrated, and get back in the car. The phone, of course, is there, on the seat, where I have absolutely no memory of having placed it.

      It’s not the first time something like that has happened to me. And I’m sure it won’t be the last.

      Of all the annoying but probably inconsequential memory issues that come with aging—not being able to think of the name of that movie we just saw or that book we just read or can’t quite be able to come up with the precise word we are searching for—losing things might be the most exasperating. Or, more accurately, misplacing things. Or even more accurately, not remembering where we’ve placed them.

      I’m not talking here about incipient dementia, about that fear many of us have when we can’t remember something we know we should remember. I don’t think I’m heading directly to Alzheimer’s anytime soon when I can’t find my phone. I’m talking instead, I think, about being too easily distracted, about not taking notice of what we’re doing when we’re doing it. Which is, indeed, it turns out, a problem of an aging brain.

      Normal aging brings natural changes to the prefrontal cortex and thus to the ability to pay attention and to working memory. The prefrontal cortex is sort of our mental notepad, where we hold information temporarily.  When you put down your keys, you're using that working memory to note their location. An older prefrontal cortex, studies suggest, might be more easily distracted and thus less efficient during this process, preventing the location from being firmly encoded into memory. Added to that, the part of the brain that helps form new memories, the formerly reliable hippocampus, also shrinks with age, and is less capable of creating strong, new memories like "I placed my phone on the car seat.”

      I’m trying—slowly, poorly—to compensate for all this. When I pull the car out onto the driveway and close the garage door, I say, out loud, “I am closing the garage door.” At least most of the time I do, so I don’t have to do a U-turn halfway down the block to drive back and check if I closed the garage door.

      I have taken to always leaving my keys in the same little basket on the same table in the same family room. At least most of the time.

      I have a notebook by my bedside and a notebook on my desk where I can jot down stuff I’m supposed to remember, like appointments and what I need to pick up at the supermarket.

      I hate having to do all this compensating because it reminds me that I’m getting older and so is my brain and so is my memory. But I hate not knowing where my phone is more.