Floyd's Looking

Week of December 8, 2014

Ok, so it has been a while since I posted. These are busy times. If you're on the marketing/BD side of your company, you know that this is the time of year when (many) public agencies push out Requests for Proposals for on-calls and/or rosters. You can be inundated with proposals to write, all just for the "license to hunt" for projects to work on with that client.

If you're like the millions of us in the USA who celebrate Christmas, this is also a crazy couple of weeks... or months... of letter-writing/mailing, gift preparations, food preparations, and all manner of decorating, traveling, to-ing and fro-ing.

All of this can make us forgetful, as the "busyness" of our lives crowds out everything else.

Many years ago when I worked in the non-profit arts world, a dear colleague of mine told me how our memory works, and why it sometimes fails us. His name is Floyd.

Floyd is the little librarian who lives in your head, in the memory stacks. Think of the memory stacks like the old library stacks, buried in the basement of the biggest library you can think of. If you're too young to know what library stacks look like, watch the scene early in the movie Ghostbusters for the basement of the New York public library. It looks pretty much like that. There are books everywhere, a card catalog in disarray, maps, stepping stools, ephemera, and junk (or gunk, as in the case of Ghostbusters).

Floyd was an adult when you were born because you wouldn't put a baby in charge of filing your learning and memories. And the task of filing and ordering your brain is so daunting, he ages at a much faster rate than you do. So by the time you are 35 or 40, he is an old man, hunched at the shoulders, an aching back and graying hair.

Now, say you're trying to remember the name of your 4th grade math teacher. You draw a blank. Actually, that's Floyd, asleep at the card catalog, or pulling out a blank card from the back of the drawer.

Or maybe you put something in the wash and go about your day. Then at 2 AM, you remember to go put the load in the dryer. That's Floyd, finally getting to the "household" stack in your mind, and pushing the "laundry" book into your hand.

Most of the time, Floyd is just r-e-a-l-l-y slow getting to the pertinent part of your brain, and that's why things pop into your head hours later. I think of Floyd as Tim Conway's little old man, shuffling along, and getting his feet stuck in the bunched up carpet (Tim Conway as the Old Man Doctor). Sometimes, he never makes it to the destination. But most of the time, he (hilariously) jumps the bunched carpet and inches his way closer to the thing I am trying to remember.

I cut myself (and others) more slack now about memory. We're all getting older -- Floyd is ancient. So when those blank memory moments happen, I know that "Floyd's looking" and it will come eventually. As the little old man says, "I'm a-comin'... I'm a-comin'..."