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Pretty often I date checks "1995." Something will look a bit odd, so I wonder if this is really 1996. I never ask anybody, lest I seem senile.

Today my daughter asked why, when I wrote a note to her at the front of a book - her birthday present - I dated the note "1995." Not making excuses, I said, "It may be Alzheimer's. I'm always saying I want to be out of here by 80 to avoid running out of money. Maybe it won't get as bad as President Reagan's did." (I'm almost 68.) My daughter and her husband laughed.

After my husband and I were in the car, I asked, "Is this 1996?" He said,"No," I asked, "Then what's wrong with 1995?" He said, "This is 2015."

I thought it must be frightening for him to discover my condition. Later, he told he wasn't scared, that he had recently told the mechanic that our car is a 1966 Ford. Looking at the car, the mechanic said, "I live in the '60s myself, but this is pushing it." The car may be from the early 21st century, but I'm not sure.

It was obvious that my husband and I both favored the 20th century over the 21st. I wondered how we chose the particular years. In his case, 1966 was the year he was a junior in college. It was a good time to be in college - a time of more passion than our last students, the ones in 2014 - often showed.

At first I thought I knew why I chose 1995. I still believed that my fiction would get published, and my husband and I thought we would find real academic jobs - not adjunct work but something with a living wage. Then I realized that it was some other year that my fantasies were intact. The year 1995 was, in fact, rather awful.

My daughter is sure that I do not suffer from any cognitive impairment. As she points out, I have been doing such things all of her life.

- Pat Gardner

Pat Gardner has a Ph.D. in English and a tendency to date current checks "1995." She's 67 now. In the past, she had a fine time teaching writing classes and reading her comedies at conferences.