It was the day I froze a household pet that I began to worry about my memory. Technically, it was not a real household pet I froze but a bag of tropical fish, which on the scale of beloved members of any home, rank somewhere below the family cat and above an attractive set of coasters. And technically, I didn’’t completely freeze my fish. Rather, I absent-mindedly tossed them into the refrigerator with a bag of other things I had bought and fortunately found them just before my highly sensitive tropical fish could turn into lightly breaded dinner fish.
Nonetheless, that near-death experience — for the fish, if not for me — woke me up to the fact that my memory might not be all it once was.
In the hope of improving my memory, I decided I would first try the memory books. However, much of what I read was, at first blush, utterly forgettable.
If I was truly going to juice up my recall, however, book reading wouldn’’t cut it. What I needed was some kind of memory pill. The big bat in the memory-pill lineup is ginkgo biloba, the dried leaf of the maidenhair tree, thought to improve circulation and, in theory, memory. I decided to try it. The package warned that in addition to any other problems, ginkgo can cause "mild stomach discomfort". After just one pill, I discovered that the package was — how best to put this — not kidding. It’’s hard to say if my memory improved in the little time I was on ginkgo, but I can say I had no trouble at all remembering to eat a tasteless diet for several days afterward.
For me, the answer to memory problems was not in the medicine chest, but that didn’’t mean I was a hopeless case. My recall had improved after two weeks in the memory-improvement battle. I may not be able to read a magazine and instantly memorize it, but I now remember to buy it when I get to the store. I may not be able to memorize hundreds of names and faces, but at least I won’’t meet an Alex at a party and find myself calling him Alan or Alvin or Evelyn.
The writer’’s tone can best be described as one of________.