Because Soon Your Memory Will Go

Your first reading glasses, your first colonoscopy, your first conservative opinion . . . ah, yes, these are the magical memories of middle age.

And, now, to make certain you don’t forget a single one of them, along comes author Mary-Lou Weisman with a sweet little album to record each and every baby step on the road to decrepitude.

“My Middle-Aged Baby Book: A Record of Milestones, Millstones and Gallstones” (Workman Publishing) is available in large print--actually it’s available only in large print--and packed with cheery, helpful reports from the far side of 40. For example:

“One of the most popular [retirement] plans involves selling the house and buying a condo somewhere warm where everyone is about your own age. . . . You will not drive at night. You will wear a pastel running suit and eat dinner at 4:30.”

The book has lots of space for forgetful baby boomers to fill in such vital statistics as head circumference, abdominal circumference, PIN number, e-mail address and cholesterol count.

There is also a lively chapter titled “I Can Read” that spells out the ABCs of scanning the obituaries, which readers are assured is a normal developmental stage. “Death is not inevitable . . . death is what happens when people refuse to profit from the obituaries of others.”

But, just in case, the last page is an easy-to-remove Living Will with a nice baby blue border and a cute drawing of a little urn.