Today I went to the bowling alley. A year or so ago, Bruce and I had befriended a couple at a local watering hole that we ran into several times a month. I can’t remember the wife’s name; it might be Donna. I’m pretty sure the husband was named Gary. She had a storage company. He might have been a long haul truck driver. Or they could have worked at something else entirely. The last time we saw them they told us they’d starting hanging out at the bowling alley I went to today so I checked the lounge thinking they might be there and they were not.

I was mulling over the thought that there are some people we meet and we immediately memorialize their names, while there are others that we know when we meet them we will not have to register their names in our mental library. Not to say that there was anything about Donna and Gary that didn’t warrant remembering; they were a perfectly lovely couple and we enjoyed their company. But I think in retrospect that I knew they were going to be a transient encounter. So I wonder what it is about our socializing these days that prevents us from really connecting, and more so, that facilitates our own disconnect such that we meet people and know that, even though we run into them on several occasions, we will not have to remember their names. The brevity of these encounters is known to us seemingly instinctively, and its as though there is an internal decision not to store a simple detail such as their name. Are we really that shallow? Have we become as data usage conscious with our own brains as we are with our iPhones?

When we were kids and a new kid moved into the neighborhood, there was a buzz about what the new kid’s name was. The big shot among us was the first to throw the new kid’s name around. The name connected us to that new kid’s mystery.

Perhaps these days we don’t register a new name because we don’t want to connect; we want to keep our distance and preserve our own mystery. We minimize our internal data usage so that we don’t make any unnecessary emotional investments. We don’t need to know the waitress’ name unless she doesn’t wait on us timely; then we want a name so we can ask where our food is.

I think I refuse to live in this data conserving age. I want to know and remember everyone’s name, as much as I want them to remember mine. A few years ago Bruce and I went to Sausalito to visit a very dear friend who had lived there for years. Every day he walked two miles around downtown Sausalito, ending with a stop at the coffee shop on the way home to get his cappuccino. We walked with him the first day of our trip and asked him what the name was of the barista that served him his cappuccino every day and he didn’t know. We were sanctimoniously shocked and made it our business to learn the name of every person we encountered on our trip so we could greet them by name as we daily toured the city. Yet here we are, four years later, pondering our inability to recall a person’s name simply because we devalued the odds of their recurrence in our social circle.

I don’t think this self-revelation is going to change anything I do. I wonder only if I have relinquished a bit of my social grace (being the good Southern girl that I am) for the sake of mental economy.