While visiting an opening reception at a local art gallery, I ran into a familiar face. She and I chatted amicably about neighborhoods, pastels, dogs, yoga, real estate prices and so on while drinking wine and eating cheese and crackers. It was a pleasant conversation.

Later that evening, my husband said something like, “That was nice to see (insert name 1 here). » And I replied: “It wasn’t (Name 1); it was (Name 2). »

The next day we realized we were both wrong. Our conversation was with Name 3.

Certainly, the three women we were thinking of have similar physical characteristics and are around the same age. But we haven’t clearly identified the identity.

That’s when I started thinking about Oliver Sacks. (Don’t everyone?) He is a renowned neurologist, best known for his collections of fascinating neurological case histories, such as “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” ” Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain” and “An Anthropologist on Mars”, as well as 1973’s “Awakenings”, a non-fiction account of Sacks’ work in the late 1960s with a group of patients at a Bronx hospital that had survived an outbreak of encephalitis lethargica decades earlier.