I forget stuff. Names. Birthdays. Whereabouts of my car keys. Why I love my dog. Why I thought ordering another bottle of Chardonnay was such a damn fine idea.
Momentous stuff, I tend to remember. My first love. My first car. (Not necessarily in that order.) Weddings -- most of them anyway. Who gave me my first Porsche Panamera.
Let me rephrase that. Give me a Porsche Panamera, or any German luxury sports sedan capable of 175 mph, your name will be cast in the quick-set concrete of my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
I promise you, a Porsche Panamera would not get lost in the usual jumble of gifts, like those electric nostril hair clippers from Christmas before last. (Who gave me those? And why?)
That's just me. Perhaps if I were the very busy mayor of a South Florida city, like say, North Miami, what seems memorable to us ordinary mortals would get lost in the chaos.
Mayor Andre Pierre has endured a cognitive overload running North Miami, wrestling with salary cuts, layoffs, furloughs. So when a flatbed truck showed up at City Hall last May and unloaded a blue four-door Porsche, the preoccupied mayor was understandably hazy about who had paid for his $101,000 ride.
When Miami Herald reporter Nadege Charles asked Mayor Pierre, his recollections remained murky. He said his close friend, David Kidd, a Miami Gardens chiropractor, had loaned him the Porsche.
Kidd's memory, however, was slightly different. Kidd said he didn't loan Pierre the car. That it wasn't his car. That Pierre was not his friend.
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