Saturdays!

It’s one of those Saturday mornings when seemingly everything I read is endlessly fascinating. Melissa Kirsch’s always-outstanding NYTimes Saturday newsletter sends me down a rabbit hole: memory and aging. She asks:

If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still “count”? Does the hard drive of our mind get so full it changes the very experience of taking in news, culture, the stories of our days?

She brings up James Collins (who is he?—must find out). She links to an essay he wrote on the subject.

When we read a serious book, Collins writes, we want to learn something, we want it to change us, and it hardly seems possible for that to happen if its fugitive content passes through us like light through glass.

Now, with a terrible sense of foreboding, I slowly turn to look again at my bookshelf. There they all are, “Perjury” and “Kavalier & Clay” and those other books that I have read and of which I remember so little. And I have to ask myself, Would it have made no difference if I had never read any of them? Could I just as well have spent my time watching golf?

And now I’ve got to read his novel, Beginner’s Greek.

Kirsch sends me further into memory issues, a clarification on aging and memory (we’ve got it wrong, the author says), and another on the normalcy of forgetfulness.

When I hit the point of being able to hurkle-durkle no longer (hunger gets me out of bed), I go to the kitchen. I listen to The Writer’s Almanac, while baking (yes, baking) bacon and scrambling eggs and putting a second pot of coffee on. This sends me down into a Sondheim hole (25 years old when he wrote West Side Story [such behind-the-scenes-drama!], bested by The Music Man at the Tonys in 1958). Even Wirecutter, The Times’s version of consumer reports, fascinates. What are the best slippers, I want to know? Glerups, Wirecutter says. (Ann already owns them, natch). What are the best gifts under $100? Gift listed number 2 on the list: best womens’ vibrator. Why is a travel backpack number 1? A toolbox number 3?

I check email and find ’s Substack and her thoughts on food writing and