There’s a stage of getting older where you start forgetting small details. Then big stuff.

And there’s a stage of self-awareness beyond the forgetting where you remember that you are a person who often forget things.

My Beautiful Wife, who rises to meet the day at the ass crack of dawn while I’m still shadow-humping the fartsack, brings a cup of hot coffee to my nightstand every morning before she leaves for work.

Why? Because she’s awesome.

For some inexplicable reason, though, sometimes MBW shoehorns a few marital directives to me in the fleeting, blinking moments between when I wake at the sound of her high heels stabbing at the carpet on the stairs, when I roll over to kiss her goodbye, and when I wink out of consciousness and back into a hot oil applique to the turkey timers punctuating Scarlett Johansson’s generous tat-tays.

MBW reminds me to do stuff when I’m mostly in another plane of consciousness.

“Don’t forget to bring in the dog before you leave for work.”

“Mmmmhmmmph.”

“I put stamps on the stack of bills by the back door. Can you throw them in the mailbox at your job?”

“Yschmmmhmph.”

“Honey, before you take off this morning can you grab a fire extinguisher and put out the inferno consuming the guest room?”

“Ahnkay. Love you. Mmmp. Hagooday.”

I have evolved into the guy who says “Yes,” but I’m self aware enough to think “Yeah, I’ll forget that six seconds from now.”

So when I ran into an old schoolmate friend of my wife’s who offered the perfunctory “Tell your wife I said ‘hello,’ willya?”‘ I cringed.  ‘Yeah. Thanks for tasking me with something I’ll inevitably fail at,’ I thought.

“Okay! See ya!” [thinking: Tell wife Heather said hello. Tell wife Heather said hello. Better write that down as a calendar reminder or you’ll forget, Shawn. Tell wife that Heathers are a strange name for flora, aren’t they? Are Heathers native to Scotland? The Scottish invented both Bagpipes and Penicillian. On the global Good/Bad karma ledger, I think that makes us Scots about even, right?]

I was quite proud of myself when I ACTUALLY REMEMBERED TO TELL MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE THAT HEATHER SAID HELLO! Yay!

It popped into my brain, and just-that-quick I blurted it out before I could forget again.

Unfortunately, I was in the middle of making love to my wife at the moment when I abruptly remembered. So… That was kind awkward.  My wife has a certain expression of bafflement she reserves for my biggest mistakes.

As long as I live, I won’t forget that expression. Of this I’m sure.