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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Ever leave something on the car roof? Last time in this space I wrote about how many people in their 60s and older begin to occasionally lose short-term memory of specific incidents. This leads to such situations as losing track of where you put your car keys or forgetting to pick up something downtown as your spouse had asked. But short-term memory loss is not the province solely of elderly people. There is one situation people of all ages get themselves into -- leaving stuff on the roof of your car and driving away with it. Let me give you a personal example. For the past 15 years, I have been reading the daily Bible verse on KDOV radio. Actually, I record the next week's worth on each Friday afternoon. I read them from a thick book that contains four translations of the Bible, side by side. Recently on a Friday afternoon, I left the house with the book in one hand and a grocery sack full of empty soft drink cans in the other. I laid the Bible on the top of the car and proceeded to stow the cans on the passenger's side of the car. Then I drove off. There was quite a bit of traffic that afternoon. Soon people in cars and people on the sidewalks started signaling me with their hands. I couldn't imagine what they wanted as they pointed to the car and made helpless gestures. Finally, a lady in a car in the lane to my right rolled down her window and reached up to pat the top of her car. Then it all came back to me. I pulled into the nearest drive, jumped out and found that the 1,000-page Bible was still on the roof of the car. The wind had riffled its pages, and several sheets of notes had been blown away, but the book itself was so heavy that it had remained undamaged on the top of the car. I turned around and returned home to find the missing pages of notes in the street, a few feet from our driveway. This actually was not the first time I had driven off leaving something on top of the car. In Portland, some 40 years before, when I was a lad of 35, I went to a grocery store, bought the items on the list my wife had given me, and also purchased a couple of magazines, which I stuck under my arm. At the car, I put the magazines on the roof, sat the grocery bags inside, and proceeded home. The magazines remained there for the few blocks I had to drive. Incidents of leaving something on top of the car are not rare, and they happen to drivers of all ages. Sometime back my wife, Nora, was out walking alone one morning when she began to notice papers and photographs strewn down one side of the street. These were obviously things people would want to keep, so she began picking them up until the trail led into a driveway. She rang the doorbell and learned that someone had pulled my trick of driving away with things still on the car's roof. Our daughter-in-law, Karen, has a similar story. After she and our son, Joe, set a date for their wedding, she began to collect the various items needed to make a large wedding a success. She even toyed with the idea of baking her own wedding cake. This came naturally because she had been professionally baking wedding cakes on the weekends for a considerable time. But Karen decided that with all the things she had to do, baking a cake would not be practical. However, on a shopping trip to Ashland she found an expensive cake top -- the ceramic piece that sits on top of the wedding cake and houses the statues of the bride and groom. The next day, she decided to take it -- still in its original shipping carton -- to the doctor's office where she worked to show fellow workers. Like everyone else in these stories, she put all of her other things in the car, but drove off with her prize possession still on top of the car. Karen drove for more than a mile before she realized the cake top was not inside the car. She immediately returned home and found the shipping carton laying in the street about 100 feet from her driveway. With quivering fingers, she opened the package and peeled away the bubble wrap. Falling from the top of the car should have reduced the ceramic to shards, bubble wrap or not, but it didn't receive a scratch. The moral of these stories -- if there is one -- is never set anything at any time on top of your car. You're simply asking for trouble. (Hank Henry, a retired Jackson County commissioner, is a former radio and television announcer. He may be contacted at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA