“What did I forget?” I asked, one eye squinting. I held out my hand as though the answer might light there like a bird. “I don’t remember.”

Jan laughed. It was a startling sight. She was very pregnant. Two weeks out of her expected delivery date, her internal organs were severely crowded. A nearly ripe fetus pressed on her diaphragm, compressing her lungs. She lifted her chin to offer breath a straight passage to ensure a flow of oxygen adequate to her mirth. The result was more pant than chuckle. Her shoulders shook. Her taut belly swayed. Still lost in searching my thoughts, I stepped back instinctively.

Sudden onsets of excessive cheer can be dangerous. I suspect they are significant causes of hunting and traffic accidents. You don’t want overly affable people with fingers on triggers or feet on gas pedals. It’s not safe. And that’s under normal circumstances with any old chucklehead. Now consider a person experiencing the chemical and physical metamorphoses attending motherhood. That’s what I was thinking about as Jan surrendered to wheezy gusto, legs buckling under the weight of circumstance, her merry flight about to end on abrupt kitchen linoleum. Two steps were all I would have needed to wrap a bracing arm around her midsection and grab her.

“Do you have any idea what I was talking about when I came in here?” I asked again, helping Jan up from the floor.

“I’m okay.”

Her voice was icy. There’s no other way to describe it. She wasn’t laughing anymore.

“I’m sorry,” I offered. “I should have—”

“Caught me?”

“Yeah, I’m—”

“Forget it.”

She didn’t seem angry anymore after she got up. I suppose she figured my failure to attempt a rescue was a consequence of infirmity. “You forgot,” she repeated several times under her breath, shaking her head and rubbing her bottom on her way out of the kitchen.

I did forget. What’s to be done about it? I had forgotten to catch my pregnant wife because I was trying to remember something else. I don’t know what, because I forgot. Or had I forgotten that initial thing twice, once before I forgot to catch Jan, and once after. Or was I continually forgetting it? Was I forgetting the thing I forgot at the same time I forgot to catch Jan, experiencing layers of simultaneous forgetting? Or, honestly, since I don’t recollect what I had forgotten in the first place, I can’t determine how often it slipped my memory. Maybe I was forgetting and remembering multiple times, but since I’m in a state of forgetting, I can’t remember if I ever remembered at all.

I do, however, remember forgetting to catch my wife.

Maybe the thing I’d forgotten was not something I forgot at all. Maybe all I had was a feeling of forgetting. Like a déjà vu of something missing that might never have been. I can’t tell because I can’t remember it.

None of these are a good sign. Not the forgetting. Not the remembering that I forgot something, I can’t be sure of it ever existing because I forgot it. Not my poor, compassionate wife’s sore butt.

Forgetting, I’ve been told (though I don’t recall by whom) is a mark of age. Age runs in my family. It runs everywhere in it. It’s practically a race. Chances are, heredity being what it is, I, too, shall succumb to it. Am succumbing. I’m forgetting more and more things, and these are the ones I remember forgetting.

My father forgot and forgot and forgot. Then, he was gone.

I forget where I’m going with this.