When you call the bank to retrieve part of the brain trust in retirement, you might be surprised what the teller will dredge up. With decades of information tucked away in our memory banks from formal education and the school of hard knocks, there is finally an opportunity to withdraw from those accumulated savings.

Think of it this way: There is a tiny little person inside each of our heads somewhere. For me, it’s Grandma — who reviews everything we experience. Once they review and categorize each incoming sensation, my granny (and your editor) place a recording of the event in the appropriate file cabinet inside our heads. Even modern science doesn’t understand how they cram so much into such a small space.

File cabinets our editors use have specific labels such as:

— Things Never to Be Thought about Again and Should be Forgotten Immediately (like items you are supposed to pick up at the grocery store)

— For Immediate Use Only (when you hope to erase or un-see something — though this is impossible)

— Things That Will Mess with My Mind Someday (you know these — as related to relatives, most likely)

— Times I Laughed My Tail Off (paradoxically, many of these occur at times of alcohol or cannabis intoxication and are things you think you will never forget, but the film clip in your head is too blurry to make out later what actually happened)

— Experiences Saved for Recall When My Mind Has Little to Do in Retirement

The last listed category of Granny’s cabinets contains an event that occurred in fourth grade that resulted in what later became modern day keyboarding classes. I was one of seven students selected as the first to be launched into the Stratosphere of Talented Typists – like the Mercury Seven astronauts were launched two years later on a different dangerous mission. Upon completion of the morning’s Pledge of Allegiance, we seven suited up in protective gear of jeans, flannel shirts, and petticoats, then walked single file across the gantry to the world’s first-ever-known Keyboard Training Facility adjacent to the principal’s office. This area, formerly a staging room for third graders, was off limits to anyone without official permission from the Commander and Chief herself, the school principal.

The classroom had been cleared of desks and refitted with tables topped with seven 1940s vintage Royal, Remington, and Underwood typewriters and a single ream of paper. Before turning the Royal-Remington-Underwood seven (RRUstro-nauts) loose on such expensive equipment, Mrs. Campbell required typewriter keyboard memorization training.

With keyboarding ground school completed, the group received permission to approach the time machines of our era to begin state-of-the-art communications. In commemoration of the historic day, fellow RRUstronaut, Billy Wadsworth Shortfellow wrote this iconic poem:

Listen, my children, of the RRUstro-naut seven,

With courage from above, as if sent down from heaven.

On the eighteenth of November, in fifty-nine,

Hardly a person now quite has the time

To brave what those did — never going online.

They said to each other, as to typewriters they strode,

“We must find communications that lighten the load”

From laborious inscriptions of pencils and ink,

No need for paper, we have to rethink

What the future will hold, some sixty years hence,

When TV brings color, and landlines are dispensed.

We won’t leave our castles, nor go out late at night,

To find our special someone, we’ll swipe left or swipe right,

On hand-held contraptions without long, curly wires

We’ll send hand-written messages to those we desire.

One thumb works the left side, the other the right,

As magical letters appear with a hint of back-light.

No need to check spelling, spellcheck will to that

While we exercise thumbs in worthless SnapChat.

Although we learn cursive with beauty sublime,

The need for such things will fade in good time.

Replaced with something, not knowing what, when, or how

We must first launch the RUUstronauts, for future know-how.