Lately I have been thinking about something I’ve suspected for a long time. I must have prosopagnosia. Now in case you don’t know what that means, neither did I until I looked it up.

People with this malady cannot remember faces. When they are not in your presence it is impossible to bring your countenance to mind. They can visualize your hairstyle, or perhaps your eyeglasses, but not your face.

If I were introduced to you down at the post office some morning, I am quite sure I could not picture your face once I got home. However, I could envision the jacket you were wearing, or your red gloves, but not your face.

The fact that I have an attention span as short as an eyelash doesn’t help matters.

For instance, forgetting names is not anything new to me. It has been a chore for a long time but at least I have found a partial answer.

Long ago, after years of embarrassing moments and living with what I called a Teflon memory, I discovered Harry Lorrayne’s book about memory. In it he gives tips on how to remember things, especially names, so I decided to give his association method a try. Harry says that when we meet someone new we should find something about his or her name that we could associate with something else. If his name is Spencer, picture him wearing red suspenders and this should lead you to his sound-alike name.

This method sounded good to me, so I tried it out shortly after I finished the book. I was at a women’s meeting one day and since I was new there, I decided to give Harry’s method a try. Two women came up to me and introduced themselves as Mrs. Miles and Mrs. Ball. (Here is where Harry comes in). Mrs. Miles was wearing miles of beads, and Mrs. Ball had a round pin on her jacket. All I had to do was picture Mrs. Miles with the beads and Mrs. Ball with a round pin and I was all set.

This method isn’t foolproof however. The next time I attended that meeting, those two ladies were there but Mrs. Miles forgot to wear her beads and Mrs. Ball had left her round pin at home. In other words, the system works, but not all the time. By the way, those meetings occurred almost 50 years ago and as a testament to Harry Lorrayne, even though I can’t tell you what I had for lunch yesterday, I still remember the names of those two women.

Now if only Harry could give me some clues about face recognition, he would save me from some embarrassing moments.

For instance, one evening not long ago, I attended a progressive dinner where we went from house to house, beginning with appetizers and ending with dessert. It was at the last house, where the dessert course was held, that this odd event occurred.

I noticed a woman standing alone against the opposite wall, with no one to talk to. Since I was alone also, I joined her for a little conversation. I didn’t know her well, but I had seen her and her mother from a distance on Sunday mornings at church. I was always struck with how much she resembled her mother, with that long blonde hair and slim silhouette.

Anyway, I went over to join her and we had a long and interesting conversation about her job, education and the pros and cons of charter schools. In fact, for me it was the highlight of the entire evening.

It wasn’t until the ride home with my friends that the bombshell was dropped. I was telling them about the nice lengthy conversation I had with Amy when my friend Trudy said, “Amy wasn’t there tonight. You were talking with Beth, her mother.”

I was blown away by this news. How could I possibly make such a mistake? Perhaps it was because we were standing side by side and not face to face, but still, I was no more than two inches away from her.

Let’s face it. Face blindness runs quite low on the handicap scale. Give or take some embarrassing moments, we can live with it. In fact, if some day while in Peterborough, you and I happen to bump into each other in Steele’s or at the Toadstool and I don’t recognize you immediately, don’t worry. After a few words with you it will come to me.

Besides, I’ve found that it is not that easy to forget a Monadnock face.

Joann Duncanson, a former Peterborough resident now living in Greenland, is the author of “Who Gets the Yellow Bananas?”, co-author of “Breakfast in the Bathtub” and author of her latest book, “Eight Crayons — Poems and Stories by an Almost Sane Woman.” She can be reached at joannduncanson@gmail.com.