Column: Tales from Exit 22

I was between places where I needed to be.

I wanted to be where I wanted to be.

I wanted to walk a trail. That didn’t work out. Even the weather itself would have admitted that it was miserable. I decided to take a stroll in a shopping mall. I had seen others walking there and they seemed happy enough.

I walked and I walked. I walk because I want to live a couple of months longer than I would if I didn’t walk. I stopped at a bookstore and received a nasty paper cut while browsing a New Yorker magazine. I’d grabbed all the gusto that I could. I decided to take a break from taking a break.

I wandered over to the nearest geezer bench and took a seat. A geezer bench is where geezers sit and wait for their wives to finish shopping. Each time I sit down, I am a different person. This time, I was a man who couldn’t put a name to a face. I was sitting there, attempting to locate my nasty paper cut while running the multiplication tables through my mind, when a man smiled and waved at me. He carried a shopping bag displaying the name of a store. He had paid for the privilege of advertising for that store. He walked over and sat down on the geezer bench. He said, “I haven’t seen you for ages. How are you?”

I’m good at remembering faces. I’m good at names. The problem is trying to connect the two. That combination throws me for a loop. I’d tell you my theory on the difficulty of recalling names and faces, but I don’t remember it. My mother said that once I reached a certain age, there would be too many names and faces in my life for me to be able to remember them all. Those memories become moving targets. She was right, but that didn’t help me identify my visitor on the geezer bench. I knew that it’s not what a man has that counts; it’s what he could live without. I was sorry that I was able to live without knowing the man’s name.

Who is he? I wondered that so intensely that I nearly said it aloud. He looked familiar, but who doesn’t? I tried to shift into drive but my brain was insistent on remaining in park. My brain’s odometer was piling on many miles as my mind searched distant databases of faces and names, hoping to find a match.

I told him that he looked good, immediately wishing I could take the lame compliment back. I might have called him “pal” or “buddy.” He was a talker. I let him talk, hoping his words would give me a swing at his identification. I struck out. My memory banks fell prey to hobgoblins. I became dimmer than a bad restaurant serving nothing but ancient leftovers. Apparently, the thing I saw lying alongside the canyon on my way to the mall, the canyon that some laughingly referred to as a “pothole,” was my brain.

I struggled to recognize the man who was talking about the high price of gas. It would be nice if we could complain about the low price of gas. He’d just told me how much he had paid, even with a coupon, for a gallon when another fellow smiled our direction. He waved and headed toward our geezer bench. I didn’t recognize this guy either. He looked familiar just as the first man had. Equally familiar.

I thought to myself, great, now I’ll have to try to introduce the second man, whose name I couldn’t remember, to the first fellow, whose name I was unable to recall. Panic mode became a viable option.

The second man shook the first man’s hand and said, “Why, Jimmy. It’s good to see you.”

Jimmy. I ran through the Jimmys I knew. There was no match. A first name was good. I could go with Jimmy. At least I’d be able to introduce him to the other guy. He was Jimmy.

The second man continued to talk to the first man, “I didn’t know that you knew Al Batt.”

The first man, the one who had shared the most intimate details of his gas purchases with me, looked vaguely annoyed. His face fell as if Moe of the Three Stooges had whacked him with a frying pan. He turned and looked at me.

“You’re Al Batt? I thought you were someone else.”

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.