There's a word for that, and the word is ...

My son was looking for some important paperwork recently when my aging brain went into full-tilt freeze mode. It not only temporarily erased one word I was looking for in my memory bank, it erased two.

"Where did you say the papers were?" he asked.

"They're out there in the thing under the deal," I said, as if that should have explained it all.

"The thing under the deal?" he asked. "Can you narrow it down some?"

The words I was looking for were cabinet under the bookcase, but those two words had mysteriously disappeared from my memory and apparently wouldn't return in the foreseeable future. "The doodad under the thingy," I said defensively. "Right where they've always been."

"Well, why didn't you just say so in the first place?" he asked, sarcastically.

And for the next week or so, every time I misplaced something, like my eyeglasses, my car keys or my wallet, he'd cackle and say, "They're in the thing, under the deal - right where they've always been!"

Now he's got his brothers saying it, too, and I've just about had enough. Just because I forget a word now and then, is that any reason to make fun of the man who gave them life? Of course not. It's ... well the word I was looking for seems to have disappeared, so ungrateful will have to do for the time being. It's ungrateful.

Fact is, I've noticed this missing-word phenomenon going on for the last couple of years, and I've become pretty good at covering up. Being a writer whose main tool is language, I can usually come up with a synonym for the lost word on fairly short notice. And I know the situation is only temporary.

I seem to lose words at random, but I find they always come back to me after a while.

For example, I spent the better part of a day recently trying to remember the word pansy, because I'd been trying to describe the flowers my mother used to line her walkways every spring, but the name of the plant just wouldn't come. Azaleas, sweet williams, crocuses and tulips were right there in the noggin where they'd always been, but pansy was a goner.

Next morning, I was pouring a cup of coffee when it popped back into my brain.

"Pansy!" I said triumphantly.

"What did you call me?" my wife asked.

"Pansy," I said happily. "Mom always planted pansies."

"What did you put in your coffee?" she asked suspiciously. Then she forgot about my weird behavior, because she was busy trying to find the cell phone she'd misplaced.

I'm even worse about remembering names, even the names of people I've known since childhood. We used to make fun of Grandma because whenever she wanted to call one of us, she'd run through the list of all her grandchildren until she came to the right one. "Now, Russ ... Ron ... Gary," she'd say, "I asked you to mow that lawn."

"Greg," I'd say patiently. "I'm Greg. Remember me? I'm your favorite."

"Don't make fun of me, or I'll whack you with a skillet," she'd say

Back then, granny's unreliable memory was cause for great amusement. But now, I find I'm doing the same thing. Sometimes, I'll run through three or four boys' names until I land on the name of the son I'm talking to. And forget remembering the names of people to whom I'm not related.

"Why didn't you introduce me?" my wife asked recently, after I'd failed to make proper introductions in a social setting.

"Erm ..." I stammered.

"You forgot their names, didn't you?"

"I remembered them until about three seconds ago," I said. "Then I started thinking how embarrassing it would be if I couldn't remember their names and, presto! Gone Johnson!"

"Performance anxiety," she said knowingly. "Happens all the time."

Next day, the names Pat and Jean popped into my head while I was driving down Route 18. I had no idea why.

"Pat and Jean," I said to my wife. "Ring any bells?"

"The Prestons," she said. "We saw them last night. You didn't introduce us."

"Why would I have introduced you, if you apparently already knew their names?" I asked, truly confused.

"I remembered their names because you did the same thing last time we met them," she said. "You couldn't recall their names until a week later, while you were fixing the toilet."

According to my doctor, this word and name slippage (is that the right word?) is very common and nothing to worry about. I do not, he said, suffer early onset Alzheimer's.

"Think of your brain as a computer disk," he said. "For your whole life, all day long, you're putting information on that disk. At some point, you've got so much data floating around, it sometimes takes a while to retrieve it. Happens to nearly everyone of a certain age."

"No kidding?"

"Certainly," he said. "Ask 10 people your age or older if it ever happens to them, and unless they're ashamed about the natural effects of the aging process, they'll all say it happens frequently. It's the common cold of memory problems."

"Thanks, Dr. Axelrod," I said. "That makes me feel a lot better."

"Hogan," he said. "It's Dr. Hogan. You've been my patient for the last 10 years."

"Well, so I have," I said. "You're about my age, does this ever happen to you?"

"Never," he said emphatically.

"Then why do you shake my hand and introduce yourself every time I come in for an office visit, like it's the first time we've met?" I asked, working on a hunch.

"Because I can never remember your na..." he said. He scurried out of the examining room before finishing the sentence. I'm sure that late that night, the name Greg Bean popped into his head, and he hadn't the foggiest notion why.

I don't know about you, but I think that's ... humorous? amusing? ironic? Oh, the heck with it. I'm sure it'll come to me later.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers.