Tuesday morning, it was dreary as I walked to the train station for work. Though the temperatures were rising, they hadn’t done so enough to melt the ice the previous day’s combination of snow and then rain had created on the sidewalks. It was safer to walk in the street, watching one’s feet while shuffling along. I was almost there when I looked up and noticed another man in front of me. He turned his head sideways, and I recognized one of my neighbors. Tony, I thought, though I wasn’t sure. Because I can’t seem to remember anyone’s name anymore.
It’s only a problem, of course, if I want to be social, pleasant, considered a good neighbor or coworker. Usually I can fake my way through. After all, how many times does one use a person’s name in generalized small talk, which is what our conversation started as. Weather, naturally. We joked about the way SEPTA trains are never on time when you’re running early and always on time when you’re running late. Then he asked me how we were doing with the new baby. These are typically the moments I feel worst about not remembering names. When others know things about my life, and I can’t recall the simplest element of theirs: their names.
It wasn’t always a problem. I used to be good with memory recall and names. Especially if you were attractive and female. But lame jokes aside, something happened after I started dating my wife. It was almost as if since my time was now occupied with building a life with her and I already had a good number of friends who I was having trouble finding the time to get together with, I had stopped taking applications. My life was all full up. It’s not necessarily the way I want it to be, but when I only see someone once every three or four months, and they only introduced themselves once when I met them two years ago and they seem to remember my name, it’s awkward to say, “What’s yours again?”
Maybe I should carry around a notebook, and when someone introduces themselves I can turn away and write it down with a brief description of what they look like. Even when I think I know it, I may not. Our next door neighbor’s boyfriend introduced himself one day, and I thought he said Darrell and my wife had thought he said Darnell, and now we’ve known him too long to clarify without coming off as complete jerks. And he’s not the only one. With another former neighbor I stumbled back and forth between Dwayne and Dwight for a while. Sometimes when I take a new employee on an office tour to introduce him or her to the people who already work in our office, I have to rely on the name-tags taped to the sides of cubes for certain people.
For now, I guess I’ll continue to stumble through. My wife confirmed that his name is in fact Tony, though she’s not sure about his wife. We know he has three kids, but she’s only sure about the names of the first two. Is there any simple way after you’ve known someone a while to get this information subtly? If you’ve devised a way, please let me know, because I’m at a loss. Should I just fess up, admit that I don’t remember and ask again? Make a joke out of it? That seems the most mature way to handle it. But what’s in a name anyway? I don’t particularly care if someone can’t remember my name, even if I met them before. If I think they don’t know my name or my kid’s names or my wife’s name, I’ll try to drop it into the conversation to save them trouble or embarrassment. Is this normal? Am I making too much of this?
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