What progress have I made in easing into Uber Eats driving?, you ask breathlessly. “Well,” I can say, “I watched a few more instructional videos, and (with much prayer and fasting) I also opened the actual app and set up a couple things.

Baby steps.

A funny thing happened the other day while I was working on the magazine for the Valdres Samband (an organization for descendants of immigrants from a particular region of Norway), which I edit.

A while back, one of my stalwart helpers sent me a link to an autobiography, the length of a short book, by one of the pioneer Norwegian pastors in the Midwest. Because of its length, I’ve split the work into three sections for publication– and an appended tribute to his wife will constitute a fourth installment. Good reading for historically-minded people, which our members tend to be.

But I had some trouble working with the text, which came to me in a pdf. You can copy and paste from a pdf to a Word document, but you’ve got to watch it every minute, because the algorithm often mistakes words (especially Norwegian words) and punctuation. And one of the pages got scanned crooked. That one couldn’t be copied and pasted at all; it would have to be transcribed. I was trying to print that page to work from, because it’s a pain to switch from one browser tab to another, but my printer had gone on strike (we have since come to an accommodation).

And then, while going through my saved files, I discovered a Word document with the same title as the biography. I opened it and – what do you know? – I had already edited the whole document for publication, and forgotten about it completely. I guess I did it after I finished the last issue, just to ease my future labors. Ungrateful wretch that I am, I failed to remember my own generosity to myself.

Is this a sign of approaching dementia? Could be, but I think I’ve always been like this. “Boy, you’ve got a one-track mind,” my dad used to say. Once a thing is out of my sight, I tend to forget its existence. Which explains why nothing’s ever put away in my house. Also my social life.

I’ve probably got the Great American Novel tucked away somewhere around here, lost down the memory hole.