I am roughly three months into my weight-loss journey and things are moving slowly but in the right direction. I’m down about 30 pounds and while visually I don’t notice a huge difference my pants fit better and I am getting to use a new notch on my belt that I haven’t been able to use before.
I knew going into this that losing weight at this age was going to be a steeper climb than when I did it in my 20’s so I was prepared for that — but as long as I continue to lose and not gain, I’m happy.
Being in my mid-40’s has brought on several new concerns. Along with difficulty losing weight, I have found that more and more I don’t understand kids these days, music is always played too loud and, most annoyingly, I can’t remember anything anymore.
It isn’t little things like I can’t remember where I put my keys and what I had for dinner last week. I feel like entire portions of my past have fallen out of my head. I recently had family come into town and, as you do when family gets together, we reminisced about the past and shared stories from our youth, and the number of things people talked about or mentioned left me feeling like I didn’t partake in any of those events. I’m assured this happens to us all as we age but it doesn’t make it any less worrisome, especially for a hypochondriac like me.
Luckily, while my memory seems to be shutting down, my senses can still remember everything. I adore those times when a smell or sound will trigger a memory and all those feelings come flooding back. I have had that happen to me several times over the last few months, from a candle my sister had that smelled like the cologne an old crush used to wear to a YouTube video I came across of clips from “Biker Mice from Mars” and “Street Sharks,” cartoons I watched as a teen that I had forgotten even existed.
Recently I had one of those moments as I was getting ready for work. I was listening to Chad & Leslye, the morning radio show on Orlando’s Magic 107.7, and they played Destiny’s Child’s “Jumpin’ Jumpin.” I had not heard it in years but that song was on a CD mix that I had back in the early 2000s when I was stationed in Italy that I listened to when I was getting ready to go to the clubs with my friends. I was instantly transported back to my 20’s thinking I needed to get my haircut and my car washed too because I work hard and I do in fact got the right to get my party on.
While I have a love-hate relationship with social media, I do appreciate that Facebook will throw up memories on my page to remind me of things I posted that I forgot about and that it recommends groups and pages that share things you may not remember, even things you might rather have forgotten.
One such post recently was from a Gen X nostalgia page that shared images of toys from the 70s and 80s that many of us had. Scrolling through and seeing them, I recalled the Cabbage Patch Kid my sister had and the talking Cooler from “Pound Puppies” that I had as a kid. Then I came across an image of the Hot Wheels City Sto & Go set. It was a two-layered city with collapsible buildings for your Hot Wheels cars that would fold into a carrying case when not in use. It was one of my favorite toys and the subject of one of my most horrible memories.
I was probably five or six years old at the time and was playing with it one day, minding my own business, and my brother, who is 11 months older than me, came in and started trying to play with it. Now granted I could have been a nicer brother and shared my toy, but I was not in a sharing mood that day and shoved him away telling him it was mine and he couldn’t play. Instead of accepting his defeat, my brother went into our parents’ room, retrieved a bowling ball from their closet, came back and threw it at my Hot Wheels City Sto & Go set.
Unfortunately his sad, weak baby arms could not throw it far enough and instead of hitting my Hot Wheels City Sto & Go set, it landed on my foot, breaking my big toe. To this day, that toe is not the same.
While that story is one of tragedy and sadness, especially for my toe, it has actually come in handy for me at several points in my life. I have used it to write a short story for a creative arts class, a monologue for a drama class and I share it often with my brother’s kids to evoke sympathy and get them on my side when my brother and I have disagreements.
Memories are great but what’s even better is saving democracy. Florida is days away from its primary elections and then roughly two months later we have the general election. Make sure you are registered to vote and that you have a plan, whether it is early voting, vote-by-mail or you plan to go the day of. Check in at Vote.org and be informed. I’d rather take a hundred bowling balls to the foot than have our democracy be a distant memory.
