by Tom Friedman
WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?
Officials of Teamsters Local 988 of Houston, Texas, must have forgotten they were running a union when they built a new meeting hall using nonunion labor. They then compounded their gaffe by responding to a reporter’s request for an on-the-record explanation with the statement, “Union workers cost too much.”
FIRST LADY OF FORGETFULNESS
While in the White House, John F. Kennedy found a note with the reminder “Department store—$40,000.” Immediately recognizing his wife’s handwriting, and familiar with Jackie’s shopaholic ways, he confronted her. “What the hell is this?” he demanded. She looked at the note, thought for a moment, and said, “I don’t remember.”
PLEASE HAVE THAT MAN REMOVED AT ONCE
The great conductor Arturo Toscanini would often sing along with the orchestra during rehearsals. But sometimes he would forget what he was doing. Once, during a dress rehearsal, his voice was so loud that it could be heard above the instruments. Suddenly he stopped the orchestra. “For the love of God,” he snapped, “who’s singing here?”
ON THE OTHER HAND, I’LL BE BORED OUT OF MY MIND
One Sunday George Salmon, a 19th-century professor of divinity at Trinity College, Dublin, absentmindedly brought to church the same sermon he had preached the year before. Unable to think of anything else to do, he pressed on, reading from the text. He later explained his reasoning this way: that half the congregation had surely not been in church back then, so it was new to them; that one quarter had heard the sermon, but was just as absentminded as he was, and no doubt had forgotten it altogether; and that the final quarter of the congregation would be happy to hear it again regardless.
DAMN! I KNEW I SHOULDN’T HAVE MISSED THE LAST SIX REHEARSALS
At an American performance of Verdi’s opera Ernani in 1847, the tenor, playing a bandit of noble descent, made a grand entrance from stage left only to find that the rest of the cast was facing stage right, waiting for him to appear. Next, he tried to pull out his sword for his big aria, only to have it get stuck in the scabbard. When he finally got it out, he couldn’t get it back in. By now completely desperate, he raced for the stage exit, only to discover that he had picked the wrong one. It was nailed shut.
ALSO, I’D FILM MYSELF ONLY IN CLOSE-UP
One day movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille found himself directing a scene in which a cowboy was supposed to fall off his horse after a rifle shot. “No matter what happens,” DeMille told the cameraman, “I want you to keep filming. Don’t stop for anything.” The scene began perfectly, but it was so realistic that a studio doctor, new to the ways of Hollywood, thought that the cowboy had actually been injured. He raced onto the set to give him first aid, ruining the rest of the shot. An enraged DeMille jumped up and ran after him, shaking his fist and cursing so vociferously that the doctor fled. When DeMille watched the rushes later, he was surprised to see the doctor dash into the scene pursued by a bald man shaking his fists and cursing. “Who in the world is that?” DeMille asked, genuinely puzzled. “That’s the studio doctor,” an assistant replied. “No,” DeMille said. “I meant the other man who was using such foul language.” “That, sir, is you,” the assistant explained. “Young man,” DeMille declared, “that may appear to be me, but I assure you it is not. I never use language like that.”
SHE MUST HAVE REALLY GOTTEN INTO CHARACTER
It’s impressive how absentminded people can passionately deliver their convoluted answers to unexpected questions. Asked to speak about the “meaning” of her coming-of-age comedy Clueless (based on Jane Austen’s novel Emma), actress Alicia Silverstone replied, “I think that Clueless was very deep. I think it was deep in the way it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place . . . if it’s true lightness.”
AND A TRUE TRIUMPH OF FORGETFULNESS!
Actor Paul Greenwood made senior moment history when he performed on the London stage in the play The Happiest Days of Your Life on opening night. At the very beginning of the first scene, he was supposed to write down a note, but he couldn’t find a pencil or pen in his pocket. There was dead silence in the theater as the audience waited for something to happen. When Greenwood finally recovered his power of speech, it was clear that he had completely forgotten his lines. He proceeded to make them up, although he did try to follow the general thrust of the play. In the third act, he asked the audience, “Shall I start again?” Amazed by the entire evening, they shouted back “Yes!” In its review, The Times of London called it “memory loss on a grand scale.”
GENIUS GETS GIRL, GENIUS LOSES GIRL, GENIUS FINDS GIRL, GENIUS LOSES TICKET
In late 1930 Albert Einstein left Berlin to visit the United States. The Einstein Archive contains the following summation of a page reproduced from his travel diary: “The page depicted here describes the hectic departure of Einstein and his wife Elsa from the railway station in Berlin, 30 November 1930. First he loses his wife, finds her again, and then he loses the tickets and finds them as well. Thus began Einstein’s second trip to the United States.”
STAMP OUT GEOGRAPHICAL ILLITERACY
In 1999 the U.S. Postal Service printed a set of 60-cent stamps with a picture of the Grand Canyon that read “Grand Canyon, Colorado.” Unfortunately, the Grand Canyon is in Arizona.
THE FOURTH ANNUAL G. K. CHESTERTON AWARD FOR ABSENTMINDEDNESS GOES TO . . . G. K. CHESTERTON!
The wife of writer G. K. Chesterton grew accustomed to the breathtaking variety of her husband’s senior moments. Once, when he was taking a bath, she heard him get out of the tub. After a long pause, there was a loud splash. It turned out that Chesterton had forgotten what he was doing and climbed back into the tub. When he realized his mistake, he cried out, “Damn, I’ve been here before!”
I’M SURE WE CAN USE THE HOLES FOR SOMETHING
While resurfacing a road in Bath, England, a contractor accidentally paved over the steel cover of an underground fire hydrant. This made it impossible to reach the hydrant in an emergency. Consequently, a firefighter was given the important job of locating it by using a metal detector. When the device first signaled the presence of metal, the fireman dug a shallow hole in the pavement, expecting to find the cover. But strangely, it wasn’t there. So he tried again and again—guided each time by the metal detector’s signal. It was only after digging seven holes in the road that he remembered that his boots had steel toe caps, which had set off the detector with each step he took—again and again.
THIS SHOULD DO THE TRICK
Barry Buchstaber was standing beside a car that had two broken windows when a San Mateo County, California, deputy sheriff asked him for identification. Buchstaber absentmindedly handed him the one official-looking document he had: a copy of an arrest warrant sworn out against him for driving with a suspended license.
I FORGET WHAT THEY CALL IT WHEN YOUR SENIOR MOMENT LASTS A DECADE
The late rock star David Bowie once said that he could no longer remember important chunks of his life, a predicament he blamed on drugs. “I can’t remember, for instance, any—any—of 1975!” he lamented.
I’M AFRAID WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO SUBTRACT YOU FROM THE TEAM, NIELS
The Danish physicist Niels Bohr, an excellent athlete in his youth, was the goalkeeper for one of the best soccer teams in Denmark in 1905. Once, while his team was playing a German club, an opposing player launched a long shot toward the Danish goal. Everyone expected Bohr to come out and grab it right away, but instead he stood gawking absentmindedly at one of the goal posts. What was it that had so captured his attention? Some mathematical calculations he had written on the post earlier in the game. The Germans scored, and Bohr never made the national team. Instead, he had to settle for a Nobel Prize.
I WAS JUST CHECKING TO SEE IF YOU REMEMBERED
Legendary talent agent and producer Leland Hayward represented top screenwriters and such high-powered stars as Katharine
Hepburn, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, and Ginger Rogers. One day Rogers complained about a script she had been sent by a certain producer. Hayward went directly to the producer’s office. “How can you insult Ginger with such trash, such drivel, such rot!” he shouted. The producer yelled back, “Get out of here before I throw you out! You sold us that story!”
LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE POPE
When President Richard Nixon visited the Vatican, his secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, showed up smoking a huge cigar, which he was promptly told to get rid of before the pope arrived. The secretary of defense obliged, putting it in his pocket—but neglected to put it out first. Just as the pope appeared, Laird’s jacket started to smoke and then caught fire. Laird frantically slapped at his pocket, prompting several other guests to join in what they mistook to be a round of applause for the pontiff.
AT LEAST HE DIDN’T ASK WHO WON THE CIVIL WAR
American actor Joseph Jefferson was in the elevator of the New York Stock Exchange building when a man with a familiar face got in. He greeted Jefferson very warmly and graciously, but Jefferson couldn’t place the man for the life of him. “I asked him as a sort of feeler how he happened to be in New York,” Jefferson explained later to a friend, “and he answered, with a touch of surprise, that he had lived there for several years. Finally, I told him in an apologetic way that I couldn’t recall his name. He looked at me for a moment and then he said very quietly that his name was Ulysses S. Grant.” The friend asked Jefferson what happened next. “Why, I got out at the next floor.”
I BET YOU COULDN’T TELL ONE MOUNTAIN FROM ANOTHER, EITHER
Even animals can have senior moments. Bruno, a St. Bernard rescue dog in the Alps, was famous for forgetting where he was and where he was going. Once, a search party had to be sent out to find him, which took more time than recovering the climbers he was supposed to rescue in the first place. That was the eighth time in two years that Bruno had suffered a severe memory lapse, and it brought his employment to an inglorious end.
SO THAT’S WHAT THEY WERE FOR
It was a spectacular and embarrassing senior moment. In the fall of 2015, an unmanned military surveillance blimp came loose from its mooring in Maryland and drifted over Pennsylvania for 100 miles, downing power lines and leaving tens of thousands of people without electricity. Fighter jets were sent up to track the blimp. Students were sent home after classes were canceled. The media pounced. It was a complete fiasco. And when the results of the inevitable investigation were revealed, the Pentagon admitted that there was a backup device on board that should have deflated the blimp as soon as it malfunctioned, bringing it down to the ground within two miles. But that never happened because no one had remembered to install the batteries that would have powered the “fail-safe” device.
SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER OF MEMORY LAPSES—MISSION 3
In 1999, NASA scientists sent the Mars Climate Orbiter 416 million miles to orbit the red planet and study its surface. Two teams were responsible for navigation. Unfortunately, one used American measurements, the other used the metric system, and both forgot to check the other’s calculations. Before the spacecraft could make it into orbit, it headed straight down to the planet’s surface and crashed.
WE REALLY SHOULD KEEP BETTER TRACK OF THESE THINGS
The National Park Service had an expensive senior moment when it spent $230,000 to buy a small parcel of land in Washington, D.C. It seemed like a great bargain until it was revealed two years later that the Park Service had already bought the land—in 1914.
THE UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION OF FORGETFULNESS
The scientific genius of Sir Isaac Newton is unquestionable. Not so his memory. One day Dr. William Stukely, a scholar best known for his studies of Stonehenge and a stranger to Newton, called at Newton’s house and was told by a servant that Sir Isaac was in his study and couldn’t be disturbed. Stukely sat down to wait. A short time later another servant brought in Newton’s dinner, a boiled chicken under a cover, and put the dish down on a table next to the visitor. When an hour had passed and Newton still hadn’t appeared, the hungry Stukely ate the chicken without thinking. Finally Newton came in and apologized for having kept his visitor waiting. “Give me but leave to take my short dinner,” he said, “and I shall be at your service; I am fatigued and faint.” Upon removing the cover, he found only a pile of bones. Embarrassed by what he took to be yet another of his frequent lapses of memory, he put back the cover and said, “If it weren’t for the proof before my eyes, I could have sworn I hadn’t dined.”
YOU CAN NEVER CATCH A CAB WHEN YOU NEED TO
When thinking about scientific problems, André-Marie Ampère, the absentminded French physicist, often took a piece of chalk from his pocket and wrote on the nearest convenient surface. Once, while walking in Paris, he was struck with a sudden insight about a particular problem. Seizing the moment, he began to write a series of notes and equations on the first available surface he could find—which happened to be the back of a hansom cab that was parked on the street. When the entire surface was covered, he was shocked to see his “blackboard” pull away and vanish down the street, taking with it the solution to the problem.
WITH MORE TIME, HE COULD HAVE HAD A TRIPLE!
A veteran speechmaker, President Gerald Ford was famous for his absentminded remarks. Once he had a “double” senior moment while addressing the student body at Mesa State College in Colorado, pronounced May-sa. First he called it “Meesa College,” and then, correcting himself, “Messa College.”
HOOPS!
The Dallas Mavericks were playing the Los Angeles Lakers in game four of the National Basketball Association Western Conference semifinals. When there were just six seconds left, Dallas rookie Derek Harper pulled down the rebound of a Laker shot and began to dribble to run out the clock. It’s the right strategy when your team’s ahead, but unfortunately, the score was tied, a fact that somehow escaped Harper. Neither his incredulous teammates’ shouting nor 20,000 Mavericks fans’ screaming prevented him from dribbling until the buzzer sounded. The game went into overtime, the Lakers won, they won the next game, too, and went on to the finals. The Dallas Mavericks—and Harper—stayed home.
AND WITH RERUNS I’D BE AS OLD AS METHUSELAH!
On Downton Abbey, actress Maggie Smith played the sharp-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham. When it was announced in 2015 that the sixth season of the series would be the last, Smith was relieved. Not because she was retiring from acting, but because the series’s writer/creator hadn’t been keeping count of the Dowager’s passing years. “I mean [my character] certainly can’t keep going,” said Smith. “To my knowledge, I must be 110 by now.”
AT LEAST I HIT SOMETHING
Sport shooter Matthew Emmons had already won a gold medal in the 2004 Summer Olympics, for shooting in the prone position. When it became clear that he had a chance to win yet another gold medal in the three-position competition—only needing a mediocre score in his final shot—he calmed himself down, determined to shut out any possible distraction. He was so calm and focused, in fact, that he forgot to look at the number above the target and shot at the wrong one. He came in eighth.
THE FINE POINTS OF SENIOR MOMENT ETIQUETTE
The British writer and actor Hesketh Pearson was in a London theater one day, waiting to speak to Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, an actor himself and the manager of the theater. A few seats away another man was waiting for Tree as well. When Tree finally arrived, he sat down between them and said to both, “Consider yourselves introduced. I only remember one of your names, and that wouldn’t be fair to the other.”
YOU KNOW, IT’S THAT AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT CONCERNED WITH SPIRITUALITY . . .
Essayist, poet, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson attended the funeral of his good friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1882, but the absentminded Emerson couldn’t recall Longfellow’s name. When he turned to
a fellow mourner, he referred to his friend as “That gentleman,” and then added, “had a sweet, beautiful soul.” Emerson often forgot the names of inanimate objects, as well, and had to refer to them in a roundabout way. “The implement that cultivates the soil” was a plow and “the thing that strangers take away” was an umbrella.
I THOUGHT MY STEED WAS GOING A LITTLE SLOWER THAN USUAL
When Reverend William Lisle Bowles (1762–1850) took his daily horseback ride on a toll road, he paid the gatekeeper two pence for the privilege. One day Bowles passed alone through the gate on foot, but handed the two pence to the gatekeeper anyway. The man asked him what the money was for. “For my horse, of course,” replied Bowles. “But, sir, you have no horse!” exclaimed the gatekeeper. “Oh, am I walking?” asked Bowles, looking around in confusion.
I’D LOVE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO THE NEW MATHEMATICS FELLOW
When Dr. William Archibald Spooner, the famously absentminded academic administrator and lecturer at Oxford University, invited a faculty member to a tea party “to welcome our new Mathematics Fellow,” the man replied, “But, sir, I am your new Mathematics Fellow.” “Never mind,” Spooner said, “come all the same.”
THE JOHNSON TOUCH
In 1961 New York Times reporter Russell Baker was coming out of the Senate when he ran into Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who grabbed him. “You! I’ve been looking for you!” LBJ said, and pulled the journalist into his office. He then harangued Baker about how important Baker was to the Kennedy administration and what an insider he was. While he was talking, LBJ scribbled something on a piece of paper, called in his secretary, and handed it to her. She took it, left the room, returned a short time later, and handed the paper back to LBJ, who glanced at it, tossed it away, and then finished his monologue. Baker later learned that Johnson had written: “Who is this I’m talking to?”