I really need a personal OS memory upgrade. Someday it will be illegal for people my age to write blobs like this one due to the danger of inflicting readers with the same stories circulating over and over again like a front-loading washing machine.

As an example of repeating myself, I don’t intentionally mean to brag. I hope you’ll be kind enough to tell me if I’ve already told you the story – no matter how momentous – of the time when I won the St. Patrick’s School 10th Grade Essay Contest for “How I Failed at Victory Gardening during World War II”. I wouldn’t want to bore you with my endless achievements, at least not repeatedly.

Yes, I fully admit it. I’m having a hard time remembering stuff, and on top of that, I’m having a hard time remembering stuff.

The day the techno-wizards ask for volunteers for the first memory chip to implant in a human brain, my hand will shoot up….

SILICON VALLEY BRAIN SURGEON: Do we have any volunteers for this beta test of our first 1 gigabyte memory implant into the human brain which will revolutionize your ability to remember where you left your glasses?

ME, (heroically): I’ll do it, Doc. Enough with the Cheetos. I need a memory chip, and you can skip the dip. I’m your man!

SILICON VALLEY BRAIN SURGEON: Well, Er… fine, but you look like you might be a woman. Studies have shown that women already tend to retain memory – especially of weight gain, Costco vs. Walmart price comparisons, celery recipes, petty insults and grudges, and how old they aren’t. Are you a woman?

ME: Oh, yeah, I forgot. Well, like I said, I need a memory chip.

It may not be an aging problem entirely though. It may run in the family. At least my brother Leo always thought so. Leo was a perfect example of the stereotypical absent-minded professor. Leo could certainly remember that he had a car, but not where he left it. I tend to be sensitive to this problem since on more than one occasion, I have been known to drive the car to work, and at the end of the day, to casually walk home.

Leo was bent on making sure all of us were well equipped with his “memory tips”. My little niece Chris, for instance, was likely the only child in her grade school who could rattle off the names of all the U.S. Presidents. Backwards or forwards. Valuable stuff like that. Sure to help with career-building in later life, especially when the recruiter wants to know, “Well, which John Adams WAS it?”

Even today my shaky memory can still pull up a trick or two from Leo: it’s handy to have the mnemonic “HOMES” help me recall the names of the Great Lakes, even if I can never remember what the “S” stands for, where any of them are, or why I would want to remember them.

I can still eke out of my memory cells that “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” can help me remember the nine planets. That is . . . .

• My: Mercury
• Very: Venus
• Excellent: Earth
• Mother: Mars
• Just: Jupiter
• Served: Saturn
• Us: Uranus
• Nine: Neptune
• Pizzas: Pluto

Leo would be happy to know that even after pitiful Pluto got all that notoriety for masquerading as a planet, I will always continue to faithfully remember it as the ninth one, and that’s all there is to it! I have heard a rumor recently that a new mnemonic to help remember the eight planets is now “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Noodles”, but don’t concentrate too hard on memorizing it in case there’s breaking news that Earth or Jupiter has also been downgraded.

Thanks to my intrepid brother, I can still remember the value of pi (3.1415926). All I had to do was count up the number of letters in each word of “May I have a large container of coffee?” I can’t TELL you the number of times I’ve needed to know that this week!

To this day, though, I still use some of Leo’s advice for applying mnemonics to help me recall my bank account password. It’s something along the lines of

M$iny$,sde?!

If you follow along with with the first letter of each word or meaning of the special characters, it translates exactly to – “My money is not your money, so don’t even ask!” Leo would be proud of me. Thanks to his mnemonic principles, it’s unforgettable, right? It’s uncrackable. But don’t tell anybody about it. Unless I call you to remind me of what it is again . . .

You too may find that as you get older you’re going to need some of Leo’s help. You may hear yourself in conversations like this:

YOU: My memory is getting bad.
NOT YOU: How bad is it?
YOU: How bad is what?

All this is to explain why I hope to have the first human brain getting a memory cell implanted. While I’m waiting though, I’m still counting on Leo’s tips to see me through. And I think they are! In spite of my current habit of going out in the garage, for instance, and then forgetting why I went out in the garage, this hopeful incident happened. A while ago, I went into another room and then actually remembered why I went in there. So okay, it was the bathroom, but still . . . .