Perhaps we forget we’re just getting older

My knees are creaking, my brain, drained. Still, there I am at the soccer field at 8 o’clock on a school night, looking for a place to sit so I can watch my 13-year-old daughter’s game.

I plop down beside a woman I know only as Mel’s mom, a comrade draped across two bleachers, her office clothes still on, her body language speaking the exhaustion of a parent on the run.

She doesn’t even look up.

“So I’m driving to the soccer field tonight. And I realize I’ve taken a wrong turn.”

I nod like a good listener.

“I turn around to go the other way. And I realize after a couple of minutes that I really didn’t take a wrong turn back there after all.”

My nod is now a knowing chuckle.

“So I turn around and go back the way I was going to begin with. I think something’s wrong with my brain.”

I am laughing out loud now.

“Seriously, I think I have Alzheimer’s.”

“So do I,” I say.

Mel’s mom and I high-five each other because the likelihood that we both have Alzheimer’s on a Thursday night is slim, and I do not mean to make light of this dread degenerative brain disease.

It’s just that everybody I know is worried they have Alzheimer’s: It’s the disease du jour for a bunch of overstretched, overwrought, middle-aged parents trying to keep up with kids who are so busy they have to be reminded to sleep.

Of course, it’s possible — knock on ebony — that one or more of us parents are in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, since as many as 10 percent of us will get some form of dementia before we’re 65, and another 37 percent, before the age of 85, according to a federally funded study conducted by Harvard Medical School researchers.

In my circle alone, at least a dozen friends have lost parents to Alzheimer’s, and another half dozen are watching their parents deteriorate in nursing homes.

As for my own chances, if we’re talking heredity, and we are with Alzheimer’s, I think of Aunt Miriam and possibly my grandmother on one side of the family, Great Aunt Della and Great Aunt Marguerite on the other.

The odds may not be all that good for me.

Then again, the reason I couldn’t remember my house address the other day might have something to do with soccer-tennis-baseball-piano-French club-look at colleges on the weekend-make a dish for potluck-show up for confirmation-sign up for summer camp-ruled by the calendar-how much can one person remember.

I keep thinking that one of these days somebody with a clipboard is going to tap parents on the shoulder and say, “The Great Experiment is complete. You can rest now.”

But nobody has. Nobody will. And so, even as our chins fall and our brains harden, even as our hairs slip down the drain and our hips give way to metal pins, we must keep trying to remember where we’re going and where we’ve been in order to keep track of the next generation, running ellipticals around us. (They are no longer circles, as circles are passe and not at all in keeping with the New Age.)

All this while worrying that we have Alzheimer’s.

I once read a piece called “The Aging Brain” in the University of Southern California’s health magazine, an article that was way over my aforementioned head, tossing around such nasty things as neurofibrillary tangles, senile plaques and inflammatory proteins.

But the part that caught my eye was a quote from Dr. Jeff Victoroff, M.D., University of Southern California associate professor of clinical neurology.

“In evolution 100,000 years ago,” he says, “it was probably rare for people to live past age 40 or 50, which means there was very little evolutionary selective pressure to make the brain work when we’re 60 or 70 or 80.

“That’s probably why all brains decline with aging.”

So there you go.

So the reason Mel’s mom and I are losing brain power may have something to do with something very serious like Alzheimer’s.

Or it simply could be that our brains have not evolved to the point that we can always remember where the soccer field is, or even which of our children are supposed to be on it.

When all is said and done — and don’t I know my baby boomer peers might have a hard time accepting this — it may be that we’re simply a little frayed at the edges, a little overwhelmed, and OK, old.