The Endgame

Newsletter #43 - The Clint Eastwood problem

Toronto, October 22, 2023

The Clint Eastwood problem

They slip away, when you’re old.

The names of people. And sometimes more than just people’s names.

About fifteen years ago I needed a new barber. Mario, the guy who’d been cutting my hair for years—he was known in the downtown legal community as “Short-Back-and-Sides”—had finally retired. Ready to try something new, I went to a glitzy hair salon just around the corner from where I lived. Sylvie, the glamorous owner, greeted me enthusiastically and asked, “How would you like your hair?” I said: “I want to look like George Clooney.” She hesitated, looked me up-and-down, smiled slightly, and said, “Would you settle for Clint Eastwood?”

I used to tell this story from time-to-time, but stopped. Why? Because often, when I got to the punch line, I couldn’t remember Clint Eastwood’s name. The anecdote would tail off into, “So Sylvie said ‘Would you settle for, you know, that old actor, the grizzled get off my lawn guy?’”

“Oh yeah,” my unamused listener would say, anxious to send the conversation in a different direction, “the grizzled get off my lawn guy. Ha ha, I get it.”

The part of my brain assigned to look after Clint Eastwood continues to fail me. I reach for his name, I’m almost there, but can’t quite get it. It’ll come eventually. In the middle of the night, I’ll suddenly wake up, thrashing about, and yell “Clint,” to the distress of my wife. “Clint? Who’s Clint?” she says, sitting up with alarm. “Are you having a nightmare?”

It’s the tip-of-the-tongue thing. The cognoscenti call it TOT. (A warning to Canadians committed to the Official Languages Act. Research shows that bilingual people are more prone to TOT than those who only speak one language.)

“Don’t worry about it,” my pals say, when I complain about TOT. “So you forget names. So what? That’s just a normal part of aging. We all have that problem. Get over it.”

“It’s lethologica,” said someone, anxious to take her vast knowledge out for a walk around the block. “You have to understand that lexical access occurs in stages,” she added, smugly. Sometimes it’s hard to be her friend.

But what if something more sinister is going on? What if it’s not just TOT? What if it’s an early warning? What if something else lurks in the distance? (The experts say if all you’re doing is forgetting names, you have nothing to worry about.)

Once more, to understand our fear, we turn to a poet. Billy Collins, former American Poet Laureate, wrote a poem called Forgetfulness (1999). Here is part of it:

“Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue

or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted   

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.”

Comments from readers on Newsletter #42

One reader drew my attention to these lines from Wilfred Owen’s poem Futility: “Was it for this the clay grew tall?/ O, what made fatuous sunbeams toil/ To break earth’s sleep at all?” Captain Owen was killed in action on the Western Front, November 4, 1918, one week before the Armistice ended World War One. 

A polymath friend who lives on the Nova Scotia shore, one of whose avocations is operatic singing, commented on Substack: “I loved performing Samuel Barber's setting of ‘Dover Beach,’ here performed by the composer. I think because of the presence of the eternal ocean whose ebb and flow will remain whatever comes...