I walked into the living room munching on a cookie. Arnie looked over the top of the newspaper he held in his hands and asked, “Is that a cookie you have?” As I took another bite from the sweet treat, he demanded, “Get me one of them, too.”

Knowing my husband wouldn’t be content with just one cookie, I put three on a plate and set it on the side table near his elbow. Sinking into a chair across from where Arnie sat on the sofa, I asked, before taking a bite from another cookie, “Do you remember the summer when we were kids that there was an invasion of June bugs?”

Arnie chewed the cookie in his mouth before asking, “Why in the world are you asking about June bugs?”

Self-consciously, I explained, “I want to write about a memory I have of them. One summer they were everywhere in the farmyard. Because they were so large, catching them was easy. It was as if they had Velcro on their feet, making them cling to our hands. At night we heard the June bugs chewing on tree leaves. When we went into the house after it was too dark to be outside, the June bugs scrabbled at the window screens. Their rapidly flapping wings made a loud buzzing noise. It appeared they would fly through the screen if they could.”

Looking mystified, Arnie claimed, “I don’t remember anything about June bugs.”

My husband seldom recounted memories from his childhood. If I worked at it, I sometimes managed to get Arnie to remember small things. That day I succeeded in pulling a small treasure out of him. He finally remembered a summer where he found huge June bugs and put them in a toy truck bed while playing in a sandbox.

I often wondered if Arnie had lost a few childhood memories because of an accident he had as a ten-year-old. A car hit him as he ran across highway 10. Besides several broken bones, I was told he didn’t wake up for three days. If that affected his memory, the injury hadn’t affected him in any other way. Not only was Arnie far better at remembering names and faces than me, but he had earned A’s in the millwright course he took.

I’ve heard it said that opposites attract. That must be true. I was very attracted to my husband Arnie, but I soon discovered that we thought and functioned totally differently from each other. It wasn’t just a man versus woman thing. What we remembered and how we processed these memories made me feel like we were two different models of humans. Sort of like the difference between an android and an apple phone. Both do the same thing, but differently.

Arnie was a rock star when it came to remembering names and numbers, but he seemed to have a problem with retaining family stories. His own as well as our children’s. Once, he was with me at the doctor’s office answering health history questions. His version didn’t match up with mine. And I know my version was right!

As my children grew up, I discovered something shocking. One of my daughters can’t remember much of her childhood. If I ask questions and remind her of things, she will eventually be able to pull up bits and pieces. She might look a lot like me, but she reminds me of Arnie in temperament and memory.

My other daughter remembers many small details of her childhood. She also has memories from an extremely early age, as I do. Although she resembles Arnie, her temperament is so much like mine that I find it startling at times.

We all are wired differently, but it doesn’t matter. I wish I could go back to the afternoon when Arnie and I ate fresh cookies and talked about June bugs. His good natured tolerance of my teasing made him enjoyable company.