Deja Vu Doo

I’ve always been one of those people who never forgets a face. If only I could as consistently remember the names that went with them. Sometimes I do. Once when I was in my early twenties, I saw a man and his girlfriend in the parking lot of an apartment building. “Aren’t you Warner Fox who came to Knollwood grammar school in the third grade?” I asked him. “Yes,” he answered with a look of amazement. “We were in Mrs. Smith’s class together,” I told him. He was amazed.

But here’s the thing. If I fix a name to someone that seems to suit them better, I literally cannot get it out of my mind. Jack and I lived next to a very nice older couple when we were first married, and though the man’s name was Ray, I persisted in calling him Neil. I tried and tried, apologized and apologized. Eventually, he began to answer to Neil. The human brain is a strange device and in my case, a sometimes torturous one.

For example, I put out sunflower seeds every day for the squirrels and birds—I never get it why people want squirrel-proof feeders. I’m an equal opportunity sunflower seeder, so much so that the squirrels put their little paws on the glass of our back doors and peer in if I’m late for lunch. Anyway, I’m putting out the sunflower seeds that David says I’m pouring out like little lines of cocaine—hmm—and all of a sudden, I notice that my tried-and-true sunflowers are mixed with little white birdseed pellets. I don’t like this and say so. David doesn’t understand the problem.

“The birds can eat both and the squirrels can eat the sunflower seeds,” he tells me.

Long a person who doesn’t like chips in cookies or nuts in brownies, I explain that now the birds have to pick out their stuff or mix it up and the squirrels as well. “Now it’s just annoying for everybody!” I say.

“It must be really difficult living in that head of yours,” says David. He has no idea. Obviously, I have digressed but this whole blather actually does have some thread of relativity which is about how our minds work or don’t.

Today, Jack and I were in Sam’s, the giant-portion store, and during Christmas rush no less, when I looked up and locked eyes with an Asian woman some twenty feet away. We both immediately smiled, waved vigorously, and yelled over the din of the crowd, “Hello! Hello!” We were both very happy to see each other, but as I wheeled my cart closer to her, I could tell by her expression that we were both in the same predicament. As I passed her, we both said, “How are you?!” then as if by unspoken agreement, neither of us answered but just kept on truckin’.

“Who was that?” Jack asked.

“I have absolutely no idea,” I replied.

Maybe this hectic world makes our synapses jump when we see a familiar face in an unfamiliar setting. Now if I could only match a familiar setting with the face. (She might be doing the same thing right now.) Or maybe people knew one another in completely different lives and in some strange warp their elliptical paths cross over in a grocery store, or on the street, and sometimes they notice and sometimes they don’t.

In any case . . . weird.