You’ve probably already forgotten that you read this

“Malaria,” I blurted. My wife looked at me from across the dinner table, a puzzled expression on her face. “What?” she asked. “Malaria. That’s the name of the disease I was trying to think of yesterday.” “Why were you trying to think of it?”

“When we were at that party last night, someone was drinking a vodka tonic and I mentioned the fact that quinine was used in Africa as a cure for some disease, but I couldn’t remember the name of the disease. Now it just came to me.”

“Who?”

“Who what?” “Who were you talking to at the party?”

“I don’t remember.” Conversations like seem to be happening with increasing frequency at our house these days. No matter how hard I try to remember something , sometimes the answer refuses to immediately pop into my head and the question rattles around in there for anywhere from 15 minutes to two or three days. Then, while I’m thinking of something entirely different, it suddenly appears out of nowhere. Generally the answer no longer is of any value and , even worse, by the time I get the answer I’ve forgotten what the question was.

Some questions are recurring. The other evening, for instance, we were watching television program in which the star was an attractive blonde woman who reminded me of an actress whose name I keep forgetting.

“You know who that woman looks like?” I asked my wife.

“Who?”

“Oh, you know, she was in that show we always used to watch.” “What show?”

“The one with the attractive blonde who was married to the short guy.” “What short guy?” “The short guy who’s married to the attractive blonde.”

Occasionally the answer I’m looking for can be found on my smart phone, but that doesn’t always work. Googling, “Attractive blonde woman who was married to the short guy” produced no help whatsoever.

A lot of times I can recall the answer with an alphabet run. For the quinine question, for instance, I tried “A” (anthrax), “B” (bubonic plague), “C” (cirrhosis of the liver), “D” (diphtheria), but I ran out of diseases before I got to “M” and had to give up.

All of this is not a major concern. I’m not yet at the point where I walk out the front door without remembering to put on my pants. And the good news is that a lot of my memory glitches tend to involve subjects that probably aren’t worth remembering in the first place. I still can summon up the important stuff and have no trouble at all remembering my address, my Social Security number, my phone number or the starting lineup of the 1954 Cleveland Indians.

Cameron Diaz.