In a recent column I made a glaring error that any educated reader would catch instantly. When it was called to my attention, I did what I usually do. I replied, “That was an intentional error placed there to test reader alertness.” The truth is that I had a brain freeze. Now, I don’t mean a sphenopalatine ganglioneuralga. That’s the experience of blinding pain you sometimes feel when eating ice cream too rapidly on a hot summer day. You know what I mean? Your eyes feel like they are going to pop right out of your skull. Then, as soon as it passes, you go right back to eating. No, the kind of freeze I’m talking about is when, despite your knowledge, you make a dumb mistake. I knew what was correct but I wrote it incorrectly. I was in good company, however, because Chief Justice John Roberts also had a brain freeze while administrating the oath of office to President Barak Obama. When the judge garbled the oath, Mr. Obama had a freeze and garbled it too. The following day, to be on the safe side, Judge Roberts did a redo and gave the oath correctly. Maybe their freezes were due to the icy weather on Inauguration Day. I suspect that stress was the culprit.

     We all are vulnerable to these lapses. Certainly we clergy are. What minister has not suddenly realized the names of the bride and groom have suddenly vanished into thin air during the wedding ceremony? Or how often has the name of the deceased flown at just the moment the eulogizer wants to speak it in a funeral? Guess why, as a young pastor, I wrote the words of the Lord’s Prayer in the front of my Bible. Yep, I went completely blank once while leading the prayer and have been scarred in my psyche ever since. I was once asked to privately redo a wedding for a couple who felt their minister had so seriously garbled their original wedding that they feared it might be invalid. As a nervous, young groom feeling the stress of the moment, I spelled my name incorrectly on my marriage license. Stress is a gremlin determined to remind us of our feet of clay. Most times it is easy to laugh away these moments of understandable, mental malfunction.

     Have you heard about the two couples who were having a neighborly conversation? John turned to Walt and asked, “How was that memory seminar you recently attended?” Walt replied, “It was great. They taught us all kinds of techniques for remembering. We learned visualization and association techniques. It was a great help for me.” Then John asked, “What was the name of the clinic?” Walt paused and thought, and thought, and thought. Then a smile brightened his face and he asked, “What is that flower with long stems and thorns?” “Do you mean a rose?” asked John. Walt turned to his wife and said, “Yes! Rose, what was the name of that clinic?”

     Whenever I have a brain freeze and my memory fails, I take at least some encouragement from the fact that I never forget old jokes. For example, Bob Hope once said that President Dwight Eisenhour admitted that the federal budget could not be balanced and Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed Communists were taking over America. Hope opined, “You don’t know what to worry about these days…whether the country will be overthrown or overdrawn.” Bob lived to be 100 years old. If he could have lived a little longer, he would have known the answer to that question.

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