A digital billboard on Punt Road changes its advertisements every 30 seconds. Last week, with the State of Origin event in town, a familiar face was promoting an energy drink. I knew that face, and the athlete behind it, but his name just wouldn’t come to me.
This was concerning. As an NRL fan living incognito in a Sherrin city, how could I forget one of the game’s greatest players? A halfback, a match winner: he’s the man who can unravel any defence. I’ve seen him play 100 times, usually helping to beat my bewildered Storm. But his name? It was completely gone.
I told myself it was just a blip. The symptom of a long day. Driving home late, I was trying to refocus after three hours on air, talking about Ned Kelly and diabetes, jazz and cockatoos. My brain could be forgiven for struggling to retrieve some random information. Yet, I knew a superstar was lost somewhere in my grey matter.
At 64, was this the beginning? The end? My dad passed away at 83, living with frontal lobe dementia for years. Compared to that, my mum just turned 94, and her Wordle scores are still respectable. Which path would I take when reaching that crossroads?
Don’t panic, David. Remember Henry Brodaty, professor of ageing and mental health, who said: “We all become forgetful as we age. We forget where we put the car keys or people’s names. But it’s when loss of memory and other cognitive abilities start interfering with daily life that people cross the line and say, ‘This is dementia’.”
Ivan – that was the player’s father, the team’s coach. Ivan, whom I asked, five blocks from the billboard. Did the surname start with K? Then there was the Matilda, his girlfriend, Mary Fowler, a spearhead in the forward line. My brain was getting warmer, potshots circling the clay pigeon.
Revisiting those cockatoos, our first topic tonight. The brilliant birds can flip wheelie-bin lids to raid the trash inside. I’d spoken to Allan Walls, a retired salesman from Lorne who’d crafted a plastic apron to fringe each lid, stopping the parrots prising the bin open. As Allan said, “It’s like trying to lift a block of wood you’re already standing on.”
Maybe that was my memory problem. I was standing on the blockage trying to release the star. I let my thoughts wander to Monash University, its long-term study of 10,000 Australians aged 70 upwards. The ASPREE Project found that people “who routinely engaged in adult literacy and mental acuity tasks such as education, journal-keeping and crosswords were 9-11 per cent less likely to develop dementia than their peers”.
I keep a journal; I never stop learning; I make bloody crosswords. But nobody is bulletproof, I realised on the road home, this stupid lid not budging. Hence, my connection ploy. Next time you do a quiz, see how many questions you recall a day later. Only a minority, I’d wager, as the topics are scattershot.
Now do the same with yesterday’s crossword, and you can use one answer to fetch another. While the player’s dad or girlfriend didn’t do the trick, a bloke like Isaah Yeo did. He’s a Penrith teammate, the skipper, and the linking player between dummy half and … Nathan Cleary. Bingo. Crisis averted. Postpone the clinic. For tonight, at least.
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