Have you ever lost a little piece of your mind? Not the whole thing, but a small piece which, being small, is both easily misplaced and difficult to find again? I have, though not often, as best I can recall.
The first such loss I note was that part responsible for reminding a man to zip it up. At the risk of inviting unwelcome scrutiny, let me confess that I almost never remember this tiny but socially impactful chore. I used to, but somewhere in the course of the extended period of concentration required to write my college thesis I misplaced this habit. That is to say early in the year 1990 I suddenly stopped zipping, and while I cared and still do care as much as the next guy about the state of my fly, that state has not been what it should be on most of the many days since then.
The fly example is, I think, a matter of pushing the machinery too hard and thereby breaking some piece of it--I imagine a fragment of mental metal now resting on the floor of my brain case. Since returning from the Netherlands I have unfortunately discovered another way to lose mental ability: in attempting to adapt to an alternate system of thought one can, it seems, bend even flexible neuronal strands too far, whereupon it becomes impossible to force that mental plastic back into its original shape.
Should I have been disturbed, upon my return, to find myself uncertain of whether decimal points or commas apply, or the correct order of street name and number? All of us, you assure me, have occasionally written the wrong year on a check sometime in January, so no surprise that there should be some lag while Dutch habits wear off. Unfortunately, I reply, they show no sign of doing so, and here it is, almost a year since I've been back. What's more, they were never habits, and that's the bit that worries me.
The entire time I lived in the Netherlands I had to take great care to date documents correctly, that is to say with day before month, rather than, as we do here, month before day. I never got used to it, I always found myself thinking "not-month-day," rather than the more direct and natural "day-month." What a relief, you might expect, to be back in the land of month-day. And yet, for me, it now feels like "not-not-month-day." Same thing with the decimal comma/point and with street addresses too. As for elevators, I actually found myself so confused the other day that only the presence of a big brass star next to the number "1" saved me from giving up and pressing at random. (And if the star is to be believed I'm not the only one.)
I suppose it doesn't much matter if I detour occasionally to the first floor on my way to ground, and in a reasonable percentage of cases the intended date is unambiguous despite being reversed, but there are other symptoms and one of them bothers me more than a little. While in the Netherlands I, perhaps foolishly, learned the language. One effect of this--and I would be curious to hear if this has happened to others--is that I misplaced part of my English vocabulary. One of the things I had been looking forward to in returning to an English land was regaining those words, and adding some new ones, too. I can tell you it hasn't happened. I'm not saying it won't, I'm just saying it hasn't, and, as I said, it's been a year now. Nonetheless, I'm glad to be back.
