Large Fierce Mammal

In Norse mythology, Hugin (Thought) and Munin (Memory) are two Ravens that serve the God Odin, flying daily over the world and returning to him with the information they’ve gathered. It’s said that Odin was troubled by the prospect that one day, Hugin, Munin, or both might fail to return.

According to one translation of the Poetic Edda poem Grímnismál, Odin reveals –

Hugin and Munin fly each day
Over the spacious earth.
I fear for Hugin, that he come not back,
Yet more anxious am I for Munin.

A story was recently related to me in which the man telling it expressed dismay at how his wife’s heretofore flawless memory – so good that he relied on it exclusively at the expense of his own – had suddenly sunk into a sea of forgetfulness upon her reaching a specific age. This is not to say that she lost her mind or that she couldn’t remember her life experiences. Only that a woman who never had to write down appointments and who could remember what everyone wore at a social engagement twenty years ago could no longer do that reliably, if at all.

Well, I ran with that, put some LFM spin on it, and here’s the result.

Llewellyn’s Wife

By LFM

Llewellyn had a gorgeous wife,
Both beautiful and kind.
He loved her face, he loved her voice,
He loved her heart and mind.

He loved how he could trust his wife
To organize and plan.
To not forget a single thing.
He was a happy man!

Then his wife turned sixty,
And it traumatized poor Llew –
The day her fifties went away
Her memory went too.

This left Llew in quandary
For his memory was shit.
His wife’s was like a steel trap
So he’d just relied on it.

In forty years of marriage
He’d just left it all to her.
That memory could atrophe
Did not to him occur.

So now his wife is sixty-five
And Lew is eighty-two.
They can’t remember anything,
But what are they to do?

There are things they’ve put away
They’ll never see again,
And appointments that they’ll miss because
They can’t remember when.

But acceptance brought back happiness,
For though her memory’s dim,
To Llew she’s all she was before
And still remembers him.