A young friend of mine complained she too has memory gaps. How young?
From the old song "Billy Boy" - She is sixty times eleven, twenty-eight and forty-seven, She's a young thing and cannot leave her mother! (727)
You know how aging is. Whatever your age, someone older by 10 years seems quite old and someone 10 years younger seems quite young.
This ancient femme informed that she knew I was going to bring up her age. Another one of those cases where the old intuition seems to be in play.
In the movies, where a mature man in a tweed jacket, slowly removes his pipe from his mouth and informs us that he expected up to bring up aging,
we naturally believe him. He seems so knowing and all. But when a woman states that she expected us to do something, we wonder. What in the world would make her expect that? We didn't expect it. We didn't expect anything. How did she? Why did she? Did she?
My wife pulls this intuition stuff every now and then. Because of the well-known confirmation bias built into our brains, I can't recall times that she "expected", "knew", "predicted" something that didn't happen. I can't even recall specific expectations that did happen, but they have popped up so often that I have just shortened the whole matter down to the rule of thumb: she is right 95% of the time.
I know she shouldn't be. I know there is no way to predict ahead of time. I know that this woman's intuition thing is a myth perpetrated on innocent young boys by powerful mothers during those periods of growth when the male brain is vulnerable and pliable.
In "The Russians Are Coming!", the sailors are sneaking around places on a New England island trying to temporarily steal a large, powerful motorboat to pull their stuck sub free of a sandbar. They have crept up on a house when a very elderly woman comes out. They all freeze. She doesn't have good vision but sees shapes in her yard. "Russians!" she says. She had no evidence, no durned reason to suspect the presence of Russians. But she is right. Intuition at work!
