Oldtimers Charades or "You Know Where She Sits in Church"

Posted: Jul 30, 2010

As I approach yet another birthday, I try even harder to find the humor in aging. Here is my latest attempt.

Southerners have never let anything, including a sudden total loss of recall, interfere with good conversation. William Faulkner mentions in his Nobel Prize speech that "when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking." (Faulkner goes on to say that speech is not the reason that man will endure--but it sounds good to me. We all know how southerners love to talk.)

If you are too young to have experienced the shock of a momentary lapse of memory in the middle of a conversation, I am sure you have at least witnessed the event. You know the senario: someone starts telling a story and then he or she says "you know who" and goes on to describe something about the individual that is designed to spur the listener's memory. This process can go on until one of the two remembers the name of the person or both simply give up, and then the storyteller comes to another impasse: the name of the place she is talking about. "Oh, you know where," she might say. "We went there last year." And the guessing game continues until the conversation is complete or both conversants throw in the towel. (Photo of Elk River sunset by my neighbor and friend Steve Copeland.)

My friend Susan calls this exchange "Oldtimers Charades" because it so resembles that old parlor game in which you must guess the name of a movie or book from a series of, usually, very bad hints. In Oldtimers Charades, the participants often resort to "sounds like" or "starts with." accompanied by a great deal of pointing and waving of hands. The good news is that if the people conversing have known one another for a very long time, both can usually come to some accord, without actually ever having used any proper nouns. I speak from experience. I have held any number of said conversations, and no one seems to find them at all odd. However, if two relative strangers are talking, there will be no progress whatsoever and the whole conversation is futile

Beth Thames, who writes a column for the Huntsville Times, tells me that nouns are the first to go. That explains the sudden blanks in the conversation each time a noun is required. Proper nouns seem to vanish more quickly than common nouns.

A dear friend of my mother's coined the phrase "you know where she sits in church" and I have found it extremely useful. Whenever this particular friend was having a conversation with her husband and could not remember the name of the person she was talking about, she would say in exasperation "You know where she sits in church!" Works every time.

So next time I am writing a piece for --oh, you know that web site I write for---and I am telling you about a new metal sculpture by --oh, you know that artist who did the Jesse Owens bronze-- to be placed at -- you know that race track near Birmingham (I am gesturing madly at this point), I hope you will understand exactly what I mean.

---Penne J. Laubenthal

Kayaking Through the Mid-Life Crisis or Resurrection

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PenneElk says...

And your mother is younger than I am . LOL Thanks for the comment and for the birthday wishes. Hope to see you SOON. Hugs, me

Ross Evans says...

That is so true, sadly I see this in my mother constantly. Well no matter how old you think you are you are always young at heart. Love you, and Happy birthday.

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Oldtimers Charades or "You Know Where She Sits in Church"

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