Searching Joseph Campbell

Margie brought to our coffee date her paperback copy of Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By (1972). There was something in it that she wanted to show me, but when we sat down together, she couldn’t find it, and she couldn’t remember what it was. This worried her. 

“I had something I really wanted to share with you.”

I glanced through the book, saw it had a chapter on Zen, and asked if that might have been it. She laughed,

“Let’s say it was. I have no clue, but I was really excited about it last night. I have to rig my life in so many ways.”

“Rig? What do you mean, rig?” 

“This book—I left it by the door with my keys so I wouldn’t forget to bring it. If I have something to mail out, I leave it where I have to step over it to get out the door. I never leave the stove when it’s on. I stand there till I finish heating my soup or whatever, and I turn the stove off before I sit down.”

I said I think those are excellent ways to deal with the memory loss that comes with aging. I said it’s great that she remembered to bring the book, and it’s perfectly normal to lose short-term memory at 95.

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“Nobody does like it. But you remember the past vividly, Margie. Most of your memory is still as sharp and clear as if it happened yesterday. It’s just short-term memory that fails you.”

Within moments she was telling me stories about her mother, after she moved to Florida and after Margie’s father died. “She had a boyfriend who had a boat, and he took her fishing. I think those were the happiest years of her life. She had enough money—not a lot, but enough, for the first time ever. She never knew she’d like fishing. She was an immigrant living in the Bronx; she knew nothing about fishing. But it turned out she loved it. I went to visit, and she couldn’t stop talking about the fish she caught.”

I said it seems to me that the memory of her mother developing a passion for fishing is more important than a paragraph in a book. She leveled me with a sharp look, “A person can want both, you know.”