When a writer is seventy-five, her fingers might be as supple, but they won't be as accurate. A lot of proof-reading is involved and fortunately, my glasses have that middle section that allows me to read the computer screen. But this is a minor slowdown.
The major one, I've been discovering lately, is that I seem to be losing my nouns. I had a lot of them once. I was a walking noun font. Friends in college remarked on my vast array of names of things. I wrote long essays full of them. Then, last week I spent a few days with college friends, old college friends, like fifty-years-ago college friends. We are all whole, only a bit dented in various ways, and my particular dent seemed to be leaking nouns. I was cooking the beautiful hunk of salmon. "Do you have any of those...green things, little round, come in a jar, also good in certain salads?" I asked.
"Capers?" answered my friend whose only age damage has been caused by the sun.
Ah, capers. A little later, I admired a plant in the window. A. . . Somewhere a synapse snapped. I said, "Shhhhh..." And then it came to me. Schefflera. I got it that time, but the next moment laid bare my noun deficit. "Just takes the Roloflex a while nowadays."
"Roladex," corrected the friend who is considering another ski season despite five broken and healed bones in her lower body.
It was all down hill from there on. Names of authors I love, titles of books I detail the plots of, even the mystery writer who writes sexy enough to get me anxious for Number 17. "I know she sounds a little Polish," I said.
"Grafton?" a friend who travels abroad a lot with her Kindle, but maybe without a map, offered.
Even though I was grateful for the name of my second-most favorite diversion, I said no. Another proper noun lost to a slow Rolaflex. Until about 2:00 a.m. when I sat up and said, "Evanovitch, probably Russian."
Sometime in all this noun escape, about the time I could not come up with the name of the device we needed to open our wine bottles, someone asked, "So what are you writing, Jo?"
"A mystery novel about an old lady who's chosen to clean up the graffiti-ed mail boxes in her neighborhood, Ellie. Ellie meets a goth girl who moves in with her named. . ." The girl, the novel, and Ellie have been my constant companions for the past year, and I can't come up with the raccooned-eyed fifteen-year-old upon whom the novel swivels. "Betsy," I lie.
About midnight, sorting through all of the conversations we've had that day, a voice says in a disgusted teen-age way, "Damn, Jo. I'm Sarah, Write it down somewhere." And I did.
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