A couple of months ago I was trying to remember the name of an old-time baseball player. All I knew about him was that his first name sounded like it was plural instead of singular, and the only name I could come up with that fit the bill was Johns Hopkins, and I knew he was an abolitionist philanthropist not a baseball player.
Believe it or not, I racked my brain for a couple weeks trying to dredge it up out of my subconscious, but kept coming up empty-handed. Of course I tried to look it up on the internet, but "baseball player whose first name sounds plural" elicited only irrelevant babble from Google.
And then one day it hit me out of the blue -- Rogers Hornsby, the Cardinals slugger who holds the modern record for highest batting average in a season with .424 in 1924.
End of story? No, because a few days after that I was thinking about how long it had taken me to come up with the name of that baseball player whose first name sounds plural -- and I realized that I had forgotten it again. Now I was irked and I vowed that if I ever remembered that cursed ballplayer and his stupid name again I would write it down so I wouldn't have to keep driving myself crazy about it.
And one day as I was sorting out the mail, the name came to me again, and I dropped what I was doing and ran to my desk and wrote "Rogers Hornsby" on the back of a business card.
All that made me feel old, but the fact that I've already had to refer to the card -- after forgetting his name AGAIN -- makes me feel not only ancient but senile.
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