Taller tales

The older I get, the more I find my mind playing little tricks on me.  They're not big tricks of the sort that make me wonder if anything's wrong.  Instead, it's the little things that come with age, and in my case it probably comes from having too much trivia crammed into my brain. 

For example, I used to be very good at remembering chronologies and dates.  You name an event, or something from my life, and almost on a snap of my fingers I could tell you exactly when it happened.  My average is still extremely good, but as the years have passed, more and more I've found myself going "Wait a minute, let me think."  Then I'll go through my mental calendar and cross-index events with times and places.  I'll come up with the right answer eventually, but I have to process it out a little more than I did a few years ago.

A little more diabolical is that the passage of time has done things to my memories and anecdotes.  I find more and more that my mind likes to rewrite history a little bit and embellish little things here and there.    The intellectual part of my brain says it didn't really happen that way.  But the other part of my brain seems to say, "Yeah, I know it didn't really happen like that, but I don't really care.  It's a better story this way."

If this keeps up, by the time I'm 50, I should be telling some really great stories.  And my nose will probably be nine miles long.