I forgot to bring a book to work the other day. I only have three breaks during a full work day, two 10-minute and one 30-minute, but I have two goals for those breaks, firstly to sit down, secondly to read. I occasionally chat or shop during my breaks, but reading is most rejuvenating, removing me from the workspace entirely.

We live ten minutes away and if I had forgotten my phone or my work shoes, I would have called my husband and thrown myself on his generosity, which while copious is not something I want to abuse, and besides, my own department stocks the magazine rack, so I decided to grab a magazine and return it afterward. I laid it Very Carefully on a clean surface. Happily I had brought one of my neater meal choices.

Our store’s magazine rack selections are less provocative than those of an airport newsstand, and I did not have a lot of time to browse. I selected a National Geographic on the human body, sort of a salute to my childhood. NG was a revered, authoritative source in the household of my growing-up family, and I read NG avidly through elementary and maybe even middle school. I remember my father paid me to index (using cards!) our collection when I was 11 or so, too young to babysit yet anxious for spending money. I remember NG as sciency.

This issue disconcerted me. No wonder I mastered it as grade-schooler; based on its vocabulary, level of detail, and sentence construction, that’s the target age. Much of the writing was so vague as to be information-free, and a few factual assertions were actually obsolete.

I am the sole remaining member of my natal family, so I can’t fact-check my memory with anyone. Did the magazine change? Or is this just another example of how the past continues to flout us as we age?

I spend a certain amount of time in the store talking to people who are stuck in the past when it comes to health and nutrition–and, I should hasten to add, lots more time with people who have researched the latest thing and want to discuss why we don’t carry it. The stuck ones often have attitudes along the lines of, If it was good enough for [insert generation here] it is good enough for [insert following generation here]: my parents/me, me/my kids, that sort of thing. I agree with this somewhat–I might “kill” to have access to the un-industrialized food of my grandparents, for instance, but that menu is not on offer now, so the good enough part doesn’t scan.

Some of my memories can be verified. Crowd scenes from the 70s, for instance, confirm my memory that overweight people were rare then. My mother was overweight, and I was the only person I knew with an overweight parent. There was a fat boy in my grade, and we had a snarky nickname for him, which he put up with, partly because he was the only one.

About ten years after getting my undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering, I remember reading about chaos theory and realizing that everything I had learned about homeostasis was being rethought. Experiences like that, as well as the fundamental changes in our daily lives during my lifetime, had led me to believe that I was untethered from my past. Yet there I was, bereft and adrift by the discovery that NG was not what I remembered, and more fundamentally, that in some core I am sheltering a lot of beliefs that were never real.

The only way out is straight through! I will embrace the present, live a balanced life, and seek to understand the past as described by the scholars of today, with no reliance on the experienced past residing in my leaky brain.