Why ‘Memory Token’

NYC Subway Tokens

Originally uploaded by photoshoparama

Originally I was going to call this blog If I Had Alzheimer’s.

Then I read a post on Daily Blog Tips called The 7 Characteristics of Good Domain Names that recommended choosing a domain name that is short and easy to remember and spell.

I thought: If I have to think at my keyboard to type “ifihadalzheimers.com,” no one else is going to bother.

So I began thinking of potential two-word domain names that had to do with memory — because this blog plans to look at different aspects of memory (more on that later).

I had an MTA pass tacked on my bulletin board from my last trip to New York, and I thought back to the years I lived there (1988-1992), when New York was about the only city that didn’t offer a pass of some sort. You had to buy tokens, which cost between $1 and $1.25 during those years.

Because I took the bus constantly (no easy way to get from West 82nd Street to East 55th Street at 11 pm), I often bought tokens 10 or more at a time, and they jangled in my pocket if I was wearing shorts. They were known as Bullseye tokens, brass with a steel center.

I loved those things and can’t believe that I didn’t save one. I guess I didn’t think New York would start offering passes like everywhere else (or truly I didn’t think about it at all). But “Memory Token” came of it, and amazingly, the domain was available.

And here we are…

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My only significant experience with Alzheimer’s Disease was my cousins’ grandmother, who developed it sometime in the early 80s.

When I saw her for the last time in 1989, she and I sat on matching bar stools while she discussed the mess of menstruation. It was this continuous loop about the blood and leaking maxipads and whether I was old enough to have started mine (I was 24).

I nodded, imagining what Steve Reich might have done with this sample.

Over the last couple of years I have been under a lot of stress, and I find myself forgetting things, often within an instant of thinking them. I know this isn’t unusual—if nothing else, I have way more stuff in my brain now than I did, say, at 14. And there seems to be an obsession about this forgetfulness, from video games designed to sharpen older minds to first-person descriptions in The New York Times to study after study touting coffee and exercise as crucial memory boosters.

Nevertheless, certain stories, anecdotes, phone numbers repeat in my brain continually, even as I forget why I am standing in my kitchen holding a crumpled plastic bag.

This has made me wonder: If I were to develop Alzheimer’s and my memories and sense of self started to peel away like so many layers of an onion (obvious metaphor, albeit fitting), which memories would be the last to remain? What would be my parallel to menstruation and bleeding?

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