1,000 Unforgettable Senior Moments

by Tom Friedman

  OTHER THAN THAT, I THINK I’M UP TO SPEED

  When Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli tried to visit his friend Lady Bradford, he was told by her servant that she had gone into town, as she usually did on Mondays. “I thought you would know that, sir,” the servant said. “I did not,” replied Disraeli, “nor did I know that it was Monday.”

  Strike That last Remark From The Record

  Australian judge Dean Mildren once declared from the bench that he was “absolutely staggered” that a notorious burglar had been freed on bail for the third time in a year, even after flagrantly ignoring a court-imposed curfew. Mildren demanded to know the identity of the idiot jurist. He was quietly reminded that he was the idiot.

  RECYCLING

  Although Arthur James, who taught classics at Eton for many years, could quote the great works of ancient Greece and Rome from memory, he was plagued by senior moments after his retirement. One day, when James was cycling home, he met a friend who noted that James had gotten a new bicycle. James looked down in confusion and realized that he must have taken the postmaster’s bicycle by mistake. So he cycled to the post office, which was seven miles away, leaned the bicycle against the wall, went inside, apologized to the postmaster, went back outside, got back on the man’s bicycle, and rode home.

  AT LEAST THEY DIDN’T DROP ANY BATS

  What better way to promote a baseball team than to shower fans with money? After one game, the West Michigan Whitecaps, a minor league team in the Detroit Tigers system, had a helicopter drop $1,000 in various denominations onto the field. Unfortunately, the team forgot just how much people loved money. In the mad scramble to grab some cash, several kids were hurt badly enough to need medical treatment. But there was one thing the team’s management did remember: Everyone who bought a ticket to the game had waived his or her right to sue.

  THE UNEXPECTED IS ALWAYS LIKELY TO HAPPEN

  Every veteran sportscaster has suffered an occasional senior moment, but precious few have had as many as British announcer John Matson, who has delighted his listeners with such pearls as: “In a sense, it’s a one-man show, except there are two men involved, Hartson and Berkovic, and a third man, the goalkeeper!”; “Bruce has the taste of victory in his nostrils!”; and “The goals made such a difference to the way this game went!”

  I WAS SO MUCH OLDER THEN, I’M EVEN OLDER THAN THAT NOW

  Years after writing and recording his classic hit “Maggie Mae,” Rod Stewart revealed that the song had been inspired by his first true love—whose real name, alas, he could no longer remember.

  IT’S A GOOD THING HE COULD REMEMBER FLIGHT NUMBERS

  When Dr. John Fellows bought a round-trip ticket from London to New York to pay a surprise visit to his daughter, he had no idea how surprised he would be. First, the absentminded doctor could not remember his daughter’s address upon landing. Then he could not remember her phone number. “I was tired,” he explained later. And so he did what anyone suffering from an especially exhausting trip, coupled with an especially bad senior moment, would have done in the same situation: He caught the next plane home.

  THAT IS TO SAY, YOUR EX–GOOD FRIEND ELLIOT MENDELSON

  When the famously distracted Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös met a colleague at a conference, Erdös asked the other man where he was from. “Vancouver,” he replied. “Oh, then you must know my good friend Elliot Mendelson,” Erdös remarked. His colleague gave him a funny look. “I am your good friend Elliot Mendelson!”

  LOVELY THRONE, YOUR MAJESTY, BUT WHAT EXACTLY DOES THIS SWITCH DO?

  When the Abyssinian emperor Menelik II decided to modernize his country in 1890, he personally ordered three electric chairs from New York, for truly modern executions. But it had slipped the emperor’s mind that his country had no electricity. As a result, two of the chairs were quickly disposed of. The third, however, served nicely as the emperor’s throne.

  OH, THAT EXPLAINS WHY HE ASKED ME FOR A DOUBLE

  In the 1920s, movie star Douglas Fairbanks was driving back to his Beverly Hills estate when he passed a man with a familiar face and an aristocratic bearing who was walking down the road on a hot day. Fairbanks stopped to offer him a ride, which the surprised man accepted gratefully in an educated British accent. Unable to remember the man’s name, but convinced he knew him from somewhere, Fairbanks invited him inside his mansion for a drink. During their conversation, the visitor seemed to know a lot of Fairbanks’s friends and was even familiar with the mansion itself, as if he had visited it often. Fairbanks eventually managed to whisper to his secretary, “Who is this Englishman? I know he’s Lord Somebody, but I can’t remember his name.” “That,” replied the secretary, “is the English butler you fired last month for getting drunk.”

  NEXT WEEK: FOOLPROOF TIPS FOR REMEMBERING APPOINTMENTS

  The members of the Oxford Library Club for Retired Professional People and Others Interested were especially looking forward to hearing a guest speaker on the subject of “Old Age, Absent-Mindedness, and Keeping Fit.” Unfortunately, the speaker forgot to turn up.

  ALTHOUGH THEY DID CRUSH THEIR LAST PRECIOUS BAG OF CHIPS

  Two New Zealand botanists spent years searching their country’s wetlands for an extremely rare flower, the aptly named “swamp helmet orchid,” which they feared might already be extinct. Then one day the tired, hungry, and dispirited botanists sat down to take a lunch break, and when they got up, discovered that they had been sitting on the flower all that time. (Fortunately, the orchid was unharmed, or else the furor would never have . . . uh . . . died out.)

  AT FIRST THE FLIGHT JUST SEEMED BORING . . .

  It was a routine Northwest Airlines flight in 2009 from San Diego to Minneapolis. At least it was routine until the plane flew past the Minneapolis airport and kept going for another 150 miles. An emergency at the airport? An emergency on the airplane? No, just a really bad case of absentmindedness. The captain and first officer were so busy looking at a new crew schedule on their laptop that they forgot to look up and check where they were or respond to air traffic control. It was only when a flight attendant called on the intercom to ask what was happening that they snapped out of it, turned around, and flew back to Minneapolis—just before fighter jets were about to be sent aloft to intercept the plane, for fear it had been hijacked.

  AT LEAST I REMEMBERED THAT I FORGOT THEM

  “Many years ago,” Harpo Marx recalled late in life, “a very wise man named Bernard Baruch (the great financier and presidential adviser) took me aside and put his arm around my shoulder. ‘Arthur, my boy,’ he said, ‘I’m going to give you three pieces of advice, three things you should always remember.’ My heart jumped and I glowed with expectation. I was going to hear the magic passwords to a rich, full life from the master himself. ‘Yes, sir?’ I said. And he told me the three things. I regret that I’ve forgotten what they were.”

  A BRIDGE TOO FAR

  When the Intermarine Company of Ameglia, Italy, landed a multimillion dollar contract to build a minesweeper and three military launches in their shipyard for the Malaysian government, everything seemed fine. But then the people in charge of the project remembered that the river connecting the shipyard to the sea was spanned by a very low bridge under which the ships would not be able to pass. The company offered to knock the bridge down and rebuild it after the ships were safely on their way, but the town refused, having grown more attached to the bridge than to the company.

  AT LEAST HE DIDN’T DO THAT THING WHERE HE SHAKES THE WATER OFF

  Philosopher Irwin Edman often used the pool of his friend and neighbor, publisher Robert Haas. One day, after finishing his laps, Edman wandered into Haas’s living room and picked up a copy of The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Forgetting that he was still in his wet bathing suit, the professor leafed through a few pages and then began to read. Later, after he’d left, Mrs.
Haas arrived home. Furious, she called for the maid and pointed at the living room floor. “It’s that dog again,” she seethed. “No, Madame,” the maid explained, “not the dog. It’s the professor.”

  WHEN I’M PRESIDENT, I SWEAR THIS SORT OF THING WON’T HAPPEN

  Abraham Lincoln served as a captain during the Black Hawk War of 1832. One day he found himself leading a militia company across a field and toward a gate. The proper command for directing the troops through the gate escaped him completely. “This company is dismissed for two minutes,” he finally shouted in desperation, “and will fall in again on the other side of the gate!”

  FLATTERY WILL GET YOU EVERYWHERE—OR AT LEAST OFF THE HOOK

  When he was having a senior moment and couldn’t place people, journalist Charles Michelson, FDR’s speechwriter and the publicity director of the Democratic Party for thirty years, used this ploy to avoid offending them. When a person asked, “Do you remember me?” he would always answer, “Yes, and it turned out you were right, didn’t it?”

  HOW MANY DAKOTAS ARE THERE, AGAIN?

  It’s hard to remember certain facts and figures without referring to notes, but you’d think a presidential candidate crisscrossing the country could remember the number of states in the United States. On the campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama said, “ . . . it is just wonderful to be back in Oregon, and over the last fifteen months we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in fifty-seven states—I think one left to go.”

  ALTHOUGH AN OFFICE IN OMAN MIGHT NOT BE A BAD IDEA

  Editors are expected to have excellent memories and fact-checking skills—unless they’re editing the magazine Business Insurance, which was forced to publish this mea culpa: “The following corrects the errors in the July 17 Geographical Agent and Broker listing: Aberdeen is in Scotland, not Saudi Arabia or England; Antwerp is in Belgium, not Barbados; Baie Mahault is in Guam, not Guadeloupe; Belfast is in Northern Ireland, not Nigeria; Bogotá was listed twice in Colombia; Cardiff is in Wales, not Vietnam; Edinburgh is in Scotland, not England; Helsinki is in Finland, not Fiji; Moscow is in Russia, not Qatar; [and] Nilsen Brothers has an office in Norway, not Oman.”

  WHERE THE TWO OF US WILL TALK ABOUT HOW CRAZY YOU ARE

  Clergyman, writer, and famed wit Sydney Smith described the English politician Lord Dudley Stuart as one of the most absentminded men he had ever met. “One day he met me in the street and invited me to meet myself: ‘Dine with me today; dine with me, and I will get Sydney Smith to meet you.’ I admitted the temptation he held out to me, but said I was engaged to meet him elsewhere.”

  WOULD IT HAVE HURT TO ASK FOR DIRECTIONS?

  In one of the greatest senior moments in sports history, Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings snatched up a fumbled football in a game against the San Francisco 49ers on October 25, 1964, and started running the wrong way. That was bad enough, but on his 60-yard journey, Marshall didn’t seem to grasp that his opponents showed no interest in stopping him. Worse, he ignored his own teammates, who raced after him shouting and motioning for him to turn around. When Marshall finally crossed his own team’s goal line, scoring a safety—two points—for the other team, 49er Bruce Bosley hugged him.

  FOR MY NEXT TRICK, I’LL BURY MYSELF IN THE WRONG GRAVE

  The Irish writer Charles Maturin, famous for his horror stories, was also well known for his mental lapses. He was often seen wearing a boot on one foot and a shoe on the other, and sometimes turned up at parties one or two days late. He once sent a novel to his publishers in several packages, but neglected to include page numbers. And so it came as no surprise to his friends that his death was hastened when he took the wrong medicine by mistake.

  THE VERY LONG GOOD-BYE

  An absentminded young woman was about to take her leave of the essayist Agnes Repplier in the writer’s Philadelphia apartment. At least it seemed that way to Repplier, who was sharper and wittier than most of her younger admirers before she died in her nineties. Reluctant to leave, the visitor picked up her hat and scarf and then put them down again. She shifted her feet back and forth. She gazed around the room distractedly. Finally she said, “There was something I meant to say, but I’ve forgotten what it was.” “Perhaps, my dear,” Repplier suggested helpfully, “it was good-bye.”

  AND IS COLONEL PANTS WELL?

  Theodore Roosevelt prided himself on his memory for names and faces, although he was just as vulnerable to senior moments as anyone else. At a White House dinner one evening, he stood shaking hands with a long line of visitors. When it was the turn of a man from New York who specialized in custom-made shirts, the haberdasher asked, “Do you remember me, Mr. President? I make your shirts.” “Major Schurtz?” boomed Roosevelt, who had known the man for years. “Why, of course I remember, Major! And how are all the boys of the old regiment?”

  THOSE WHO MISLAY THE PAST ARE DOOMED TO FORGET IT

  Like many communities, residents of Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, decided to prepare and bury a time capsule for the people of the future. It was buried in 1962 and was supposed to be dug up twenty-five years later during the town’s centennial, but when 1987 rolled around, all the people involved in filling the capsule had died. Since they also had forgotten to write down its location, the ceremony to dig up the container had to be canceled.

  LET’S SEE NOW, WHICH ONES GO “BAA” AND WHICH GO “MOO”?

  At the Institute for Animal Health in Edinburgh, Scotland, scientists were studying whether the country’s sheep could have been infected with mad cow disease. They had already spent four years in extensive testing when investigators discovered that someone had absentmindedly mixed up cow brains with sheep brains in the freezer, after someone else had mislabeled them.

  AND THE CHILDREN SHALL LEAD US

  When the family of MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the nearby suburb of Newton, his wife knew the famously absentminded professor would never be able to find his way to the new place on his own. So she wrote down the Newton address on a piece of paper and gave it to him before he left that first morning. A few hours later, when an idea struck him, he found the piece of paper in his pocket and scribbled some notes on the back. After he looked over the notes, however, he decided his idea was worthless, and threw the paper away. With no note to remind him he had moved, he returned to his old house in Cambridge to be met by his daughter, waiting there for him. “Hi, Daddy,” she said. “Mommy thought you would forget.”

  STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THE ONE ABOUT ALL THE KING’S HORSES

  Britain’s Charles II, who reigned from 1660 to 1685, loved telling anecdotes about his past. His courtiers, who had heard the stories many times, found them so boring that they tried to escape if they could. The Earl of Rochester, for one, wondered how a man who could remember every last detail of a story couldn’t recall that he had told it to the very same people the day before.

  WHO DO YOU THINK WE ARE? GEOGRAPHERS?

  The disaster movie Krakatoa: East of Java is about the devastating eruption of a volcanic island and the tsunami that followed. Alas, no one in Hollywood remembered to check a map before the film went into production. Krakatoa is actually west of Java.

  I ALSO DINED LAST WEEK

  The classics scholar Richard Porson, who held the prestigious Regius Professorship in Greek at Cambridge University, never remembered to answer letters. Sometimes he remained incommunicado for days or even weeks on end, having forgotten to tell colleagues what he would be doing, where he would be staying, or when he would reappear. Once, when asked to dinner by a friend, he replied absentmindedly, “Thank you, no. I dined yesterday.”

  NO STARCH, AND MAKE SURE YOU TAKE EVERYTHING OUT OF THE POCKETS

  Since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962, every U.S. president has been accompanied at all times by an armed military officer carrying a
n impenetrable titanium briefcase known as the “nuclear football.” The briefcase contains the codes needed to launch a missile strike. The president also carries an “authenticator ID” that must be used in conjunction with the codes—unless, of course, he forgets where he put it. President Jimmy Carter did. He left it in the pocket of one of his suits, which was then sent off to be dry cleaned.

  TWO OUT OF THREE, MON AMI?

  In 17th-century France, the Comte de Brancas was playing backgammon when he asked for a glass of wine. He proceeded to gulp down the dice and throw the wine on the board, soaking his opponent in the process.

  TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY SORRY ABOUT YOUR DEATH

  Having attended the University of Edinburgh, Henry Erskine, Lord Advocate of Scotland in the late 18th century, would occasionally return to the university to visit his old friends. One day he met an especially absentminded, now elderly, tutor of whom he was very fond. He was taken aback when the man greeted him by saying, “I was very sorry, my dear boy, that you have had the fever in your family. Was it you or your brother who died of it?” Bemused, Erskine replied that it was he who had died. “Ah, dear me, I thought so,” the tutor said sadly. “Very sorry for it,” he kept muttering as he went on his way. “Very sorry for it.”