Compensation

I have been plagued most of my life by a propensity for getting lost, and by a poor memory. Both would haunt me in serial nightmares which may have their roots in childhood trauma (what doesn't?) and would eventually mushroom into a lifelong fear of getting lost and forgetting.

Getting lost and forgetting.
One of my mother's sisters spent her last years in a deep fog, a victim of Alzheimer's. Two of her other siblings are in earlier, but nevertheless devastating stages of the illness. My Aunt Yvonne called up the other day from Devon, England where she lives alone. She is sill lucid enough to realize that she is forgetting, which may be more distressing than being in total oblivion. She does not want to live alone anymore and is planning what she says will be her last trip to Australia, a country she very much loves.
My Uncle Henry lives in Texas. He wakes up at night disoriented and wanders through the house looking for the familiar among the mundane. He thinks he's lost, but he's forgetting too. Is there any difference?

Terrifying as this all is, it is not the kind of 'getting lost and forgetting' that has plagued me.
Let's start with numbers. I can't hold them in the order that I got them. Dyslexia? Maybe.
My job is all about numbers - special numbers like prices, quantities and dates. Markdowns and margins.
These are numbers that no one can afford for me to get wrong, so to compensate for my handicap I have become a note-taker extraordinaire. I have notebooks dating back ten years detailing my daily to-do's and important events including a log of the days I was not at work ( absence is a defense), phone numbers, user names and passwords for the secured sites and databases I must navigate in the course of doing my job.
If there is a meeting, however informal, I take the minutes. Minutes are especially important in two-person meetings. If I sense that 'drape thy derriere' (aka C.Y.A) insurance is required, I follow up with an email detailing the exchange. This dysfunction is not limited to numbers, but happily, problems with prose are less in evidence. My worst work-related nightmare is being cornered with a question whose answer I know but can't remember. Try proving that. I'd be the perfect fall-gal if I couldn't  refute or confirm something with conviction, and as you know, conviction is the difference between the blue sky and a self-healing... I mean, a cell ceiling.

Similarly, I have no sense of direction - no internal gyroscope. Or, not one that functions: turn me around a few times and I'm lost. I thought a GPS would make up for my non-existent nose for North, but it did so much more. The directions given by the typical GPS are moronic, containing lots of loops and 'long cuts'. However, following them is not as moronic as getting lost and it is loads better than feeling lost.
I've named my GPS's female voice 'Alice' as in Jefferson Airplane's Go Ask Alice.
I once followed Alice's directions for Brooklyn which took me from the Bronx to lower Manhattan via the FDR Drive and through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Had I Map-Quested it, I might have gotten there faster than you could say 'Jackie Robinson Parkway', but at least I had the luxury of telling Alice where to get off, rather than feeling like an idiot that I got lost. GPS devices are really mis-marketed as navigational aids; they're at least 50% psychological aids, too.

In all seriousness, I would not like to fall victim to 'Big Al'. I'd much rather lose my faculties gradually in a way that my son and future grandchildren would find at least mildly entertaining. The more hokey stereotypes I can fit, the better. Advances in dentistry have probably saved my teeth from a watery resting place and circumvented a slew of old-lady jokes, but hell - I can get bifocals, my hearing could fade gradually.
In the movie 'Mission Impossible III', Tom Cruise's character, breathless from a brush with death, phones a friend for a favor: access to some restricted data files. The friend says, 'I've gotta use my scissors and shit for this.' which to me, was hilarious. I cracked up laughing, repeating it (at least twice) to my son, who informed me dryly with a withering look: Mom, it's 'I'm gonna lose my citizenship for this.'
Which, in 22 states and counting, would be no joke. I like what I heard better.