The Woman Who Can't Forget (15 page)

Dr. Parker was warm and clearly sensitive; she came across as a deeply caring person, and I felt comfortable with her right away. She could not inform me, at that point, about what each of the tests was designed to measure, as that might affect my performance. Some of them were strange to take; some were a breeze and fun, whereas others boggled my mind. I was asked to recall lists of words I'd read, and also to recite back to her, in reverse order, strings of numbers that she read out to me. A frustrating one was the Stroop Color and Word Test, in which the word for a color appears on a computer screen but in a different color from the word. So the word
blue
might appear in yellow and the word
green
might appear in red. I had to choose from the four color words at the bottom of the screen which one was shown above. The test measures how fast a person's brain gets past the fact that the color and the word don't match and allows the person to choose the correct color name.

A much more enjoyable test for me was the Proverbs Test, in which the assignment is to write the meanings of a set of twelve widely known sayings, such as “A tree is known by the fruit it bears,” “Don't cross bridges until you get to them,” and “The harder the storm, the sooner it's over.”

Although the purposes of these tests were mystifying to me, I was hopeful that all of the testing would produce some answers, and I felt relieved to be involved in a truly scientific process of discovery about my memory.

Over time as I met with the scientists, they would spontaneously quiz me about dates, and later each of them would tell me that there was a special “blown-away” moment when he or she suddenly understood just how different my recall abilities are. For Dr. McGaugh that moment was on the first day I met him, when I corrected the date for the taking of the hostages in the U.S. embassy in Iran from November 5 to November 4. For Dr. Parker that moment was when I got a perfect score on the facial perception test. She told me later that was when she knew she was dealing with a mind that was substantially different from any other one she'd studied.

For Dr. Cahill, the aha! moment was when he brought in an article about the
Murphy Brown
TV show's Christmas episode in 1988, the first year of the show, and quizzed me about the date it was broadcast. I immediately told him the date was December 11, and he shook his head, disappointed, and told me it had aired on December 18. I shot right back that I was sure that was wrong, because on that day, I was watching
The Brady Bunch
Christmas movie at home, which was on the same network in the same time slot. He looked stunned that I would remember that. To prove to him that I remembered right, when I got home, I dug out my TV episode guide book and confirmed that in fact the episode had aired on December 11 and I faxed him a copy of the page. Over the years I would report to him about lots of dates I had found in books or magazines that were wrong, faxing them to him that way.

In early 2001 the scientists called to tell me they wanted to fill me in about the results. I went down to Irvine to meet with them on Saturday, February 24,2001. Dr. Parker had written me a letter summarizing the results, and reading that letter was a watershed moment in my life:

I think perhaps the most powerful words were those that confirmed that my sensation of my mind processing information differently, and the workings of my memory being so unusual, had been confirmed:

What an amazing feeling it was to be getting scientific confirmation about the phenomenon that I'd never been able to describe to my family and friends. There was clearly a long way to go yet before we would know what was really going on in my head, but at least I now knew for sure that I wasn't crazy.

The scientists explained that this set of results was just the beginning of the process. For one thing, none of the tests I had taken yet had been designed to test for the automatic nature of my recall, and they were going to devise additional tests to assess that. For example, one of the tests they eventually gave me, on Friday, November 21,2003, was to ask me, with no warning, to write down the dates of all of the Easters that I could remember. I started in 1980, the first year of my strong recall, and within 10 minutes, I wrote down all of the dates and also short notes about what I had been doing on those days. The list was reproduced in the paper the scientists published later as follows (again, some of the descriptions of what I was doing I preferred not be published and so the scientists indicated them as simply “personal”):

AJ'S UNEXPECTED RECALL OF ALL EASTERS SINCE 1980

As their note at the top indicates, I had gotten one date wrong by two days. When they asked me to write the list again, spontaneously, two years later, I got all of the dates right, and when they showed me the two versions side by side, I immediately pointed out to them the one error that I had made the first time. They were particularly impressed by my ability to recall these dates because for one thing, the date of Easter varies so much year to year, and also, because I'm Jewish I don't celebrate that holiday.

They informed me that they were applying for approval and funding for a more extensive study and that getting the approvals would take some time. Another component of the additional testing they wanted to do was to make a series of brain scans in order to try to determine if there were any unusual structural features of my brain.

Little did I know how methodically and slowly the wheels of science turn. Many more months would go by before I would hear more from the scientists, but in the meantime, I was to experience the other magical transformation in my life that I could never have expected would come along.

T
he word I received from the scientists, confirming that my mind really did work differently from most other people's, was empowering and liberating in a way that is hard for me to describe. I was thrilled at the prospect of finally learning, as their work with me continued, what was really going on in my mind, and in these later years of my thirties, I reached a new balance in coping with my ever-present past. But my life was not at all the way I had dreamed it would be. From when I was a small child, I had imagined that my life would be centered around a wonderfully happy marriage and raising lots of children. By this time, that seemed the prospect of a long-lost life, a life I had simply not been destined to live. Then suddenly I was to fall in love.

The Internet had connected me to Dr. McGaugh, and now it would connect me to another man who would change my life—the warm, strong, confident, and hugely likable man who would become the love of my life, Jim Price.

I had become fascinated with searching the Web a few years back, in 1999, when John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s plane went missing. I was riveted to the television set all weekend, and when I went to work on Monday, July 19,1999, I got on the Internet at work and kept track of the news. Immediately I was hooked. What I loved most was the way the Web could serve up any kind of news and information, and I began reading several online newspapers every day and sampling articles from newspapers all over the world. In keeping with my obsession about the past, I especially loved searching the phrase “today in history,” and was consumed by reading all about the things all over the world that had happened that day. The next thing I knew I was making notebooks in the same spirit as my journals, and over the years I filled many looseleaf notebooks with writings and records.

My surfing took on a new nature when on October 18, 2002, my computer at work was upgraded to a new version of AOL, which made accessing chatrooms a snap. I had never participated in chatrooms before, but I discovered that I loved them. I've always been curious about what was going on in other people's lives; I love to sit in airports or when waiting for friends at a restaurant and watch people or listen to their conversations, and I love getting people to talk about their lives. Surfing around chatrooms was a way of listening into conversations and talking to people all over the world. That's what I did for three straight days: went into AOL chatrooms and dove into the dialogue.

I went into the Jewish room. I went into the Christian room. I was talking to people who were Backstreet Boys fans, and to those chatting about 9/11. I checked out chats on current events and participated in conversations about the most banal things. One day I went into a chatroom and asked who likes tuna sandwiches on rye bread. The next thing I knew, everyone was chatting about their food cravings.

I had pretty much given up on actively looking for love by this point and had come to the conclusion that if it was meant to enter my life, it would just show up, by providence; it wasn't something that I could make happen. Never in a million years when I woke up on the morning of October 23, 2002, would I have thought that I would meet my husband later that day. His name was Jim Price, and in the short time we had together, he gave me the gift of a new life.

I entered a random chatroom in which thirty-six people were logged on and started chatting away with them. Suddenly James22 started talking to me, and before I knew it, everyone had stopped talking and only he and I were writing on the screen. The thirty-six people were still logged into the room but only he and I were chatting. We talked back and forth for a few messages and then, oddly, because we hadn't been writing anything romantic, somebody in the room typed in:
You should try

love
, and logged off.

James22 then asked me,
Do you mind if I Instant Message

you privately?
It was so surprising that I was almost startled; I hadn't ever gone off-line that way from a chat before, but I was intrigued and decided to take the leap. We popped off and he IM'd me. I found talking with him completely natural.

After a few minutes of easy back and forth covering the basic hellos, he wrote: “So how do I get to know you better as a friend first?” I didn't know how to answer, but I loved that he had asked me that. Being such an archivist of my life, I of course printed out and saved that first chat, and the many others that followed. I didn't know exactly how to answer his question, but he thoughtfully helped me along the way, and before I knew it, we'd agreed to pick up the conversation later that night. It was such a simple conversation, but it came to mean the world to me:

Gyll23: good question

James22: its hard to answer sometimes but id really would like to know more about you

Gyll23: what do you want to know?

James22: anything you feel comfortable sharing with me

Gyll23: lets see…I have lived in CA since I was 8; I am from NYC and have a younger brother I work in the entertainment business and my dog's name is Walter.

James22: I've lived in cali all my life. I have two boys.

Gyll23:What are your boys' names?

James22: Ben is 14 Tyler is 11

Gyll23: love the name Ben

James22: yea is very cool name

Gyll23: What grade are they in?

James22: bens in 8. Tyler in 6. Ben goes to high school next year

James22: Are you tall?

Gyll23: 5' 7" how about you?

James22: perfect I'm 6'1

Gyll23: tall!!!!

James22: yea I guess so

Gyll23: when I was in high school I dated a boy who was 6' 5" and he was the shortest brother!!

James22: WOW what color hair do you have?

Gyll23: dirty blonde

James22: very good

Gyll23: And you?

James22: blk and gray and hzl eyes

James22: hey hunny

Gyll23: Yes?

James22: I need to go pick my kids. Will you be around so we can talk later?

Gyll23: I leave work at 7 pm talk then

James22: yes we will sweetie

It was that simple. With Jim, right from the start, I had no reservations, no worries about my looks or my weight. We were just two people in the air somewhere in cyberspace. As it turned out, Jim didn't wait until 7:00 to get back in touch. I had AOL up all that day at work, and he checked in with me again several times. I learned that he was thirty-nine, two years older than me, and had been divorced for four years and had two sons. Then I filled him in about my memory, and he was fascinated. He had written about his son Ben, and our conversation flowed from there as follows:

Gyll23: so Ben was born in 1989

James22: yes…and Tyler in 91

Gyll23: what date?

James22: sep 20th

Gyll23: I remember where I was that day.

James22: you do?

Gyll23: yes

James22: Where?

Gyll23: He was born on a Friday?

James22: yes he was

James22: 8:10 pm

Gyll23: I have a photographic memory beyond comprehension

James22: wow very kool

Gyll23: Ben was born on a Wednesday.

James22: yes wow at 1:47 am

Gyll23: I had just returned from Florida the day before. Am I freaking you out?

James22: no I think its very kool

James22: see im very good with numbers and faces Gyll23: tell me what year and date you were married and I can tell you what day it fell on.

James22: June 18 1998

Gyll23: numbers, dates, names, faces…drives me crazy sometimes.

Gyll23: do you mean 1988…if so it was a Saturday

James22: yea sorry

James22: and what else was that day

Gyll23: the day before father's day…my friend Larry's mom died that day…

James22: very impressive

Gyll23: I could blow your mind.

James22: You already have

I had never experienced anything like the easy back and forth I had with him, and I liked him from the first moment. He seemed unaffected and grounded, and when I told him about my memory, he'd found it intriguing. Later he grew even more fascinated by it and would tell people that they should ask me to date some event from their lives, showing my memory off for me. Meeting Jim on the Internet freed me from the inhibitions I would have felt if I had met him first face-to-face. In person, I would have been plagued with self-doubt. How do I look? How do I sound? How quickly should I reveal things about myself? I knew people often lied on the Internet, but Jim felt genuine to me, and the more he and I chatted that day, the more intrigued I became.

Surprising as it was to find myself coming to this conviction, that very day, after just those few chats with Jim, I decided that all the things in my past that had held me back were not going to stop me anymore. I wasn't going to let my fears get in my way. I wasn't going to worry that I would always remember the bad experience this might turn out to be. That was probably the first true moment of spontaneity in my adult life in which my memory was not holding me back. I was not yet in control of my memory, but I believe that in that moment, I began to get out from under its control.

Later that night, Jim and I talked on the phone, for five and a half hours. In our last chat, we had agreed that he'd call me at 10:30
P.M.
, and as the time got closer, there were more and more butterflies in my stomach. I had printed out the transcripts of all of our chats during the day, and as I sat in my bedroom reading through them, I realized how much I wanted things to work between us. I even practiced how I was going to say hello because he'd never heard my voice.

In a funny way, I did feel a little like I was deceiving him, because the person he spoke to at the beginning was the person who I was always meant to be—not the person who had been so thwarted by her memory—and that's who he was attracted to. But for whatever reason, it was at this particular point in my life, with this utterly unexpected opportunity, I decided that for the first time since I could remember, I was going to proceed as if I had nothing to lose and I was not going to be scared. On the phone that night, I felt that I was somebody totally different from the Jill I always had been. I was the Jill I was always meant to be.

I learned more about how to embrace life from Jim during the time we spent together than I had from anybody else in all my life. We were from almost diametrically opposed backgrounds—different religions, different lifestyles, different socioeconomics. He grew up poor; I grew up with money. I spent my summers on the beach or in the swimming pool in my backyard; Jim was sent to work in a defunct gold mine that his grandparents owned in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He and his brothers would be shipped up there at the beginning of the summer to stay with their grandparents and work, and the place was so remote that when the sun went down, they had to go to sleep because there was no electricity.

I grew up in Los Angeles, shopping at boutiques, eating in great restaurants, taking extravagant vacations. As Jim put it, he grew up eating government cheese. Even our taste in music was completely different. He loved rock and heavy metal, and I loved almost every kind of music
but
those. He lived for the Ozzfest and was extremely proud of his T-shirt collection from all the years he'd gone. Jim was a seriously casual guy; he wore flannel shirts and swore he'd never wear a three-piece suit because he wasn't that kind of person.

He had basically been on his own from the time he was seventeen years old, and he was married with his first baby before he was twenty-six. He had worked as a machinist and a mechanic, and he knew how to fix cars and make any kind of home repair you might need. My dad and my entire family were helpless that way. Changing a lightbulb in my house was a major construction challenge. For anything beyond that, we called a repairman.

Jim was a wonderful father, deeply devoted to his sons, and he had loved being married, but after seventeen years, he and his wife had drifted apart. Over the past several months before we met, when he wasn't with his kids, his life had become a dull routine. He told me he would come home from work, take a shower, and go to sleep. To my great good fortune, he had decided that it was time for him to meet someone new.

It was exhilarating to feel free and easy and comfortable and relaxed. The feelings I was having were so new that I almost couldn't recognize them for what they were. Friends had always told me that falling in love was that way. I just never had before.

That first night on the phone, Jim and I even watched television together, and for stretches as he watched his screen and I watched mine, we just listened to the sound of each other's breathing. It was as if we were sitting side by side on the couch, a comfortable old married couple. When we finally got off the phone, it was 3:30 in the morning. I got into bed, and my heart was pounding so hard I could hardly breathe.

On the way to work the next morning, all I could think about was whether he'd be on the computer again that day or whether he'd call me. I did talk to him that day, and that night, and we talked Friday night too, after I got home from dinner with a friend, and then again on Saturday and Sunday night.