Parking at the light rail station Saturday, an SUV beeped nearby. A young man dressed for success leaped out, calling my name.
He looked familiar. Unfortunately, I have not mastered the art of faking it while placing a face out of context. He identified himself as my friend's son. I've only known his mother for fifteen years. When he was in preschool, he came to my house at least twice a month. Of course, he wasn't dressed in a suit then, heading downtown for a pre-Homecoming dinner.
People regularly recognize and approach me in public places. Sometimes they are from the distant past; sometimes the relationship was casual or infrequent. I enjoy the encounters, except for my initial confusion, when identification does not naturally follow recognition. As a rule, my memory is good; it just doesn't like to work under pressure.
Some people are hurt, saying, "You don't remember me, do you?" The best response is remarking that their hair is different. Unless addressing a bald man, the person is unlikely to take offense, buying me valuable time to retrieve the name fighting its way into my consciousness.
Other people offer an assist: "My cousin Julie said the other day, 'Susan, have you seen Karin since she quit bowling?'" At that moment, I clearly remember why I liked her so much.
As a child, I believed my father knew everyone in the world. Since he grew up in Northeast Minneapolis, I was used to him chatting with every storeowner, janitor, city councilman, waitress and policeman. He knew their families. He also had the enviable knack of remembering them instantly, even when the connection was vague. ("You're Eddie's cousin! We used to play stickball on 32nd Street! Remember when I knocked out Eddie's front tooth?")
The remarkable part was no matter how far from home we went, we still ran into someone he knew. In 1967, a Minneapolis coworker called out to him waiting in the Washington Monument tour line. At the top of Terry Peak in South Dakota, a couple of softball buddies riding a chair lift hollered down. On Waikiki Beach in 1980, his next-door neighbors collared him.
"Can't we go anywhere without someone recognizing him?" I complained. It was like having Brad Pitt for a dad, without fainting girls or hired security.
My mother shrugged. "Everybody knows him because of his red hair. They don't even have to remember his name." I didn't know my dad's name for years, since everybody called him Red.
While my experience is not as dramatic, I have run into a high school classmate in a crowded casino, neighbors at a Mesa, Arizona Christmas light display, a childhood friend on a city bus and one son's former teacher at Disney World. In every case, the other person was alert, while I was oblivious.
I suspect that is yet another demarcation line in personality traits. Some people are adept at finding faces in a crowd. Others have hair that is hard to forget.