Time and Memory

This whole notion of time speeding up - I know you have heard about it – has me thinking. I feel like I crossed a point a few years ago when life shifted gears and sped up. Now I spend less time waiting for things to happen and events zip by so quickly I barely have time to breathe.
I have a theory about why it is so much easier, as we get older, to remember things that happened forty years ago than it is to remember a shopping list for tomorrow. It is because time moved so much slower then. We had time for the information to get into our brain and be properly stored. With time moving so fast there are days when I feel that I am trying to catch information with a butterfly net and names, dates, events, ideas and shopping items keep slipping through the holes. Nothing sticks. Nothing has time to get firmly embedded into the memory banks. If it does, it has a precarious hold and something else may easily knock it off.
My brain does not seem to be able to discriminate between what is important information to keep and what is meaningless. I can easily recall my phone number from forty years ago but struggle to remember my grandchildren’s birthdates. Sometimes a sequence of numbers will pop into my head for no reason and I will realize that I am remembering my locker combination from high school.
My father used to run through a whole list of names before getting the right one. When he spoke to me he would start with “JoAnne”, then “Barb” and finally “Linda”. The same in reverse would happen to my mother and sister. He eventually just called my sister and me “punkin’” as a means of making sure to get it right the first time.
I hear people everywhere talking about how time is just speeding up. Things are happening faster than we can take in the information. Technology is moving so fast that information learned in the first two years of college can be obsolete by graduation. It feels like just yesterday that I was holding my youngest granddaughter, Lizzie, in my arms and now she is almost four years old, ready to take on the world as Princess Peach with her boyfriend, Mario. I had no idea who these people were until she explained the whole Nintendo game world to me in five minutes, hands flying, with vivid detail. I was playing Candy Land at three years old. How does this all happen?
It is all very disconcerting. Mick Jagger is dancing around on stage in tight pants while in his sixties and I can’t seem to figure out where the nineteen sixties and seventies went. He is obviously stuck back in time while Keith Richards walks around looking like a forty year old corpse. I have stopped watching PBS specials with classic rock musicians because I always wonder who these balding, gray people are lip syncing to my favorite songs.
I may be rambling here. My mind is trying very hard to figure out where everything is happening. That is if time can happen in a place. It is like trying to catch dust motes between your fingers. Just when you think you have one, it disappears and you wonder if you ever had it at all.
I asked Lizzie to slow down. I asked her not to grow up so fast. She is my last grandchild and I am going to miss the cuddling and the Lizzie Mae and Grandma Mutual Admiration Society meetings. When I ask though, she very thoughtfully looks at me and says “But I have to, Grandma. I have to grow up.” Why does it have to be so fast? Why can’t the good things just slow down enough so that I can savor a moment without thinking about the loss coming so quickly? I just hope the Lizzie memories find a good strong place to hold onto in my memory banks so that I can find them easily when she is all grown up.