Senior Jeopardy

For several years I have amused people by suggesting I am the inventor of Senior Jeopardyg. It is identical to the long-running TV version, except you get to ring in with the answer, in the form of a question, the next day. When you’ve finally thought of it.

The trouble with this joke, like many jokes, is that it’s no joke. I have been a Jeopardy fan as far back as the Art Fleming daytime version. I used to wow my elders then. I may not have known every answer on the board, but my recall for what I did know was at thoroughbred speed.

Alas, these day my brain proceeds at the pace of a spavined burro ridden by Sancho Panza. I am told this is normal, just a part of aging. But this doesn’t entirely set my mind, such at is, at ease. Using a walker, falling down in the bathtub, losing your hearing, eyesight, and teeth, and cancer are also part of aging. I don’t welcome them either.

Nightly on Jeopardy, vile, clever, young people beat me to the answer. Answers that I know are rattling around somewhere in my cranium. They are on the tip of my tongue. They just won’t show themselves. The worthless information I have spent decades accumulating has suddenly become bashful. It must be coaxed to show itself, like some shy wood nymph. As someone from early television, whose name will come to me in another half-hour, used to say, “What a revoltin’ development.”

Part of my Jeopardy problem is not worth worrying about. As time has passed me by there are whole swaths of pop culture experience on which I have remained a blank slate. I know hardly any pop songs since about 1985, for instance, when rock died and rap and country divided the spoils. I hasten to add that I understand there’s something called rap and/or hip-hop only because I have been told I am listening to it when something making a pounding noise without melody or harmony rattles my car when it is played in another car about 100 yards away at a stop light. I certainly can’t answer any questions about it including why people listen to it.

No, the things I am pretty sure I once knew (and may still know) are the ones that worry me when Alex asks and three other contestants beat me to the buzzer. It’s infuriating. In fact, I got so worried recently that I asked a medical professional about it. She said it was just a part of aging, but she’d give me a quick senility test. I was freaked. What if the test was recalling the questions to Jeopardy answers — quickly?

“On your mark, get set — Capital city of a country named for the longest line of latitude. Common denominator of Billy Graham and John D. Rockefeller. Extinct bird hiding in Margaret Mean’s habitat.”

Oh help! I feel like Ralphie in “A Christmas Story” when Santa asks what he wants and he can’t remember. Hint: He’ll shoot his eye out.

But, in fact, the test the nurse gave me didn’t require me to think of Quito, the Baptist faith or the Moa. Instead, she asked me to repeat three words — table, bridge, rope. Then she gave me a paper with a circle drawn on it and asked me to fill in the numerals on a clock face. Okay, 12 at the top and so on around to 11. Does neatness count? And then she asked me what the three words were.

“Table, bridge, rope.”

“Fine.”

“What do you mean fine?”

“You passed.”

Really? That’s it? If you can’t pass that test your brain isn’t just slowing down with age but, like Elvis, it has left the building. This should have cheered me up, but a few hours later the whippersnappers with Alex were still beating me to answers I knew as well as my own name. The smart-alecks.

But at least by then I did remember that the “revolting development” guy was Chester A. Riley from “The Life of Riley.” And for the bonus points, he was played by William Bendix. So there.

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