Twenty five years ago, I spent the week of Christmas in California with my first extended family. Much of that vacation is only a blur, and some of it was a nightmare. But what’s been driving me nuts lately is one little detail I thought I’d never forget – the name of a winery we visited. I know we went to two: Robert Mondavi, and – the other one. For years, I knew the name. Any time the subject of wineries or Napa Valley came up, I could easily summon both names and mention, either casually or smugly, “Oh yeah, I’ve been to Mondavi and” – the other one.

But now I’ve forgotten, and the harder I try, the more certain I am that I’ll never remember. So, of course, it’s driving me even crazier. I’m becoming convinced that I’m either 1) getting so old my new memories are shoving out the previous ones or 2) developing Alzheimer’s. Getting Alzheimer’s is no joke to me, since my own mother had it in her later years. Hers showed up after my father died, and I’m nowhere near as old as she was at the time. Besides, I can remember all kinds of other things. They say that Alzheimer’s is not losing track of your keys, it’s forgetting what your keys are for. And I still remember that sort of thing. I’m still a functioning, fully employed member of society. I know what keys are for, even when (especially when) I lock myself out of my office.

Yet it really bothers me that I can’t remember. I’m a librarian, master of facts and databases, so I figured if I couldn’t remember on my own, I could certainly track it down without much trouble. Sure enough, I quickly found a listing of all the wineries in California. I’m pretty sure the name of this one began with an R, but no matter how many times I look through that part of the list, nothing rings a bell. By now, I’ve gone through every single name, from A to Z, giving each a chance to nudge my old memories.

Was it Adelaida Cellars? No. But I remember pushing my son in his stroller, giving him drinks of apple juice from a blue plastic bottle while we grown-ups tasted a chardonnay. Was it Dancing Stallion Vineyards? Uh-uh. But I remember a photo we took of our blonde-haired daughter, peeking out from the enormous door at that nameless winery’s entrance. Was it Hidden Oak Winery? Nope, but I remember eating at a delicious restaurant named The Chutney Kitchen after our trip to the vineyards.

Was it Chateau Mantelena, star of the current movie “Bottle Shock”? I know it wasn’t, but peered closely when we went to see it, hoping for a glimpse of “my” winery. I even borrowed two winery videos from the public library, hoping against hope that these 1990’s-era travelogues might just mention that destination from my distant past. But no.

Next I tried a different tack. I have every letter my mother and I ever sent to each other, and I figured I must surely have mentioned our tasting adventure to her in a letter from late 1982, when we were so far away from each other. But there’s nothing from mid-December until mid-January. We must have talked on the phone instead of writing, something we rarely did. But oh, how I hoped for a postcard, something with a picture of that medieval looking door on the front and a name on the other side. Rothschild? Roberto? Rosebud?

Maybe that winery, as firmly planted in history as it seemed to be at the time, went out of business. I tried a search for “wineries California 1980” but got weird, useless links. Should I go to a wine store and browse for hours, causing consternation among the shop owners? If I begin studying wine lists with way more attention than usual, will I needlessly raise the hopes of the waiters?

Besides, it’s not a wine I’m looking for. It’s not even really a place. I could joke and say it’s my mind I’ve lost, because I know that even if I do recall the name of that winery, next month I’ll forget something else, and I’ll be whining about another thing I absolutely must remember – the color of my first car (white), the name of my first pet (Patches), the lake at the resort where my family spent every summer (Ada). All those questions we’re asked to answer to protect our privacy in our online accounts – what if we can’t remember the name of our first school, the month our father was born, our mother’s maiden name?

This is one place where being a poet comes in handy. I can write a poem about a moment in time that I would surely otherwise forget, tucking into one stanza the name of my first boyfriend or the fourth grade teacher who encouraged me to write. I can write about those little moments until I’ve got a whole treasure trove of them, stuck firmly into the otherwise dull cement of my memory like the jewels in the grotto in Dickeyville.

For the longest time, I couldn’t remember the name for something that wasn’t even important to me, but loomed large because I couldn’t remember. The word? “Pallet.” Finally, I got someone to remind me, and I wrote it down somewhere. Now I can stop worrying about that one. Then I forgot the name for something more important to me: Exposition, which means the back story in a movie or novel. I wrote that one down on a notecard and stuck it on my bulletin board, complete with exclamation point, to make it seem like a joke: “Exposition!”

Taken singly, none of these is life-or-death. But as we get older, we miss that easy ability to recall seemingly everything. And like the pinot noir I tried at that unnamed winery, it’s right on the tip of my tongue – a delicious tease, with somber notes of forgetfulness just waiting to recork the bottle.

Pam Kress-Dunn

pam2617@yahoo.com