Recognizability

In the last three days, I have run into three people from my past. We're talking, 15 to 20 years ago.

All of them have immediately recognized me, known my name (first and last), where they knew me from, and in some cases, what college I went to and that I got married.

Granted, I wasn't on a best-friend basis with any of them (two women I went to high school with, and one guy I went to church with) . But the fact that they knew all of these things about me, when all I could do was stare blankly is a little embarrassing. I mean, I could register them as being vaguely familiar-looking but indistinguishable from the cable repairman or the next door neighbor.

There are also scads of people who "recognize" me, usually about one a week. "Don't I know you from somewhere? You look so familiar!" I just smile and say that there must be some other ahem "generously proportioned" woman with similar coloring, who looks a little bit like me.

And now I'm thinking, "Shit! What if that was my gynocologist? or someone I used to babysit?" And of course, I am drawing a complete blank.

This is getting embarrassing. Espectially because they all these people who know me from high school basically say that I look exactly the same, and I patently do not (hello, FIFTY pounds!!!!). I am guessing that looking thirty when you are actually 16 may have its benefits. Let's hope it carries over into my fifties.

So yeah, it's beginning to bother me that I can't remember names and associate them with faces. Is it just that I'm preoccupied, or do I have a brain tumor? And have I mentioned that Alzheimer's and senile dementia run in my family?

Perhaps you too will be able to recognize me in a few more decades. I will be the really young-looking old lady wearing all the sequins and a pair of bunny slippers, announcing loudly that the bed linens in the store window are "nipple pink!" While my minders discreetly try to bundle me back onto my Lark.