The BetsyG-Spot

Here’s a piece by my good friend Ron, whose bio appears at the end. —BetsyG

By Ron Bachman

The other day at work, I entered an elevator whose sole occupant was a woman. I pushed the button for the fifth floor, and in the time it took the elevator to travel from the second floor to her stop on the fourth, the following conversation ensued:

HER [with a look of recognition]: Hi, how are you?
ME: Just fine, thanks.
HER: Wow, I hardly recognized you. You’ve changed a lot!
ME [shrugging]: It happens.
HER: You look great. Do you think you’ll do another session?
ME [as elevator stops and door begins to open]: I’m not sure…
HER [stepping out of the elevator]: Well, you don’t look like you need it.
ME [as door closes]: Thanks.

Pretty innocuous, right? But there’s much more—and much less—going on here than meets the eye. Here’s a version of the same conversation with a commentary track describing what was going through my mind as we spoke:

HER [with a look of recognition]: Hi, how are you?
I have no idea who you are. But you seem to know me, so I’ll play along until I figure it out.
ME: Just fine, thanks.
But I’d be a lot better if I could remember who you are.
HER: Wow, I hardly recognized you. You’ve changed a lot!
Aha, apparently it’s been so long since we met that I’ve forgotten. But surely I haven’t aged so dramatically that she barely recognizes me!
ME [shrugging]: It happens.
Not to me, it doesn’t.
HER: You look great. Do you think you’ll do another session?
Session? Oh, crap, she probably mistakes me for a fellow Weight Watcher who’s dropped a lot of pounds. But the elevator’s stopping, so it would be really awkward to point that out now.
ME [as elevator stops and door begins to open]: I’m not sure . . .
. . . how I wound up lying to a perfectly nice woman. Make it stop!
HER [stepping out of elevator]: Well, you don’t look like you need it.
I never did!
ME [as door closes]: Thanks.
I hope I never see you again!

Nothing like going from “hello” to “oh hell” in less than a minute. And to think, I could have avoided it, if I’d just had a little more faith in myself. See, there was a time when I had a memory like Fred Astaire’s dance steps—precise and unfaltering. But over the years, my ability to recall things such as friends’ birthdays and people’s names has slipped quite a bit. What hasn’t changed, though, is my skill at remembering faces. Even a fleeting contact can be enough for the facial recognition software in my brain to record an image of someone’s kisser.

But when I encountered the woman in the elevator—a woman whose kisser didn’t ring even a distant doorbell— I failed to trust my memory. She seemed so sure who I was, I figured it must be my fault that I wasn’t sure who she was. Her absolute conviction made me doubt my vaunted powers of visual recall. Why?

It’s all in the timing. This encounter took place about a week before my 50th birthday, and I’d been obsessively indulging in the inevitable ruminations about getting older that such a milestone provokes. So when she appeared to know me and then commented on how much I’d changed, my mind immediately defaulted to “oh-god-not-only-is-my-memory-shot-but-I-look-like-freakin-Methuselah” mode, thereby short-circuiting the logical conclusion that she’d simply mistaken me for someone else.

The inadvertent consequence was that it turned me into a liar. Once I realized my age obsession had backed me into a corner, my instinctive aversion to humiliation kicked in and forced me to keep up the pretense. I justify my deception by observing that coming clean would only have embarrassed her, and by playing along, at least I made a fool of only one of us.

Funny thing is, my mortification over the whole incident has now obliterated her face from my memory. Which means if I run into her a second time, I won’t even recognize her.

Here we go again.

Ron Bachman lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a collection of memory-improvement books that he’s somehow misplaced. When not feigning relationships with total strangers in elevators, he works in public television and dreams of the adventurous life he might be leading if only he could find his car keys.