The Name Game

Great to see you again

My social life has changed considerably. Gone are the parties when I danced until the wee hours. Gone are the long dinners with lots of drinking and pot on the balcony. Gone are gatherings every weekend and bumping into dozens of friends in cafés and terraces. I still do each thing but not as often and fervently as I used to. And, with a few exceptions, many of my close and not-so-close friends have also cut down on their feverish social life.

This is why I’ve noticed a real change in my greetings when I stumble on people I used to see often but now only see at important occasions—usually at funerals (let’s be honest). I’ve had my share of those recently, and while they are solemn and sad affairs, they do bring together people who once shared my daily life before we all moved on to Life After Sixty.

The latest gathering brought together people a few careers ago. It was an intense experience of the how-long-has-it-been variety. There were a few five-year absences, but most were much longer. To all our credit, we recognized each other. Our faces, though more wrinkled, remained unique. And everyone looked younger than they actually were! (She said, being an expert in visual age calculations.)

But here’s the rub:  At least fifty percent of the friends I hadn’t seen in over ten or twenty years were recognizable but without a name. I could tell you what they did, where we worked together, how many kids they had. We talked about friends we had in common, crazy stuff that happened many years ago, and what we were doing now. But while the conversation was fluid and without long pauses, I was petrified that someone would tap me on the shoulder and expect an introduction. I knew everything about this person but their damn name.

When I confessed to one friend that this was happening, he assured me I was not alone. “It’s happening in every corner of the room, Janet. Don’t worry. No one’s going to blow your cover because they’re in the same situation.” These words produced one of the biggest sighs of relief I’ve had in a while.

The experience reminded me of an idea I came up with fifteen years ago and had just started to forget people’s names.

At that point in my life, I was not really connecting my brain has lost your name occurrence with the fear of dementia many of us carry around. As a young middle-aged pup, I speculated that I had so many friends and acquaintances, it was impossible to keep track.

In any case, my solution to this problem? Change the way we all greet each other. If you haven’t seen someone in a while, you always say your name first, and then they do the same. Make sure even young people do this greeting so it becomes an accepted practice (not just for us oldies). If you have a person’s name squarely in your head, you still say your name out loud, in case the other person is the one doing the brain-search and coming up empty.

The idea should be easy to promote. But the implementation might be tricky. How do you convince people to follow this rule? (If we lived in China, there would be laws, and people would be fined if they were seen on one of the billions of cameras not greeting each other appropriately.)  But here in the Land of the Free, I’m unsure how to enforce it. But one can dream.

And so I wait until my next gathering when I meet someone I worked with in Vancouver in the 70s and talk with fingers crossed, hoping the conversation flows without any names actually being spoken aloud.