Where Harry Potter was born and the man with the 10-minute memory

The other day, at the bookstore/coffee house where we hold our regular RVtravel.com staff meetings, I overheard a woman asking a clerk if a woman sitting nearby was okay. The woman in question was alone at a table, reading. “Oh, she’s fine,” said the clerk. “She has dementia. One of her children will pick her up before long.”

As I returned to my staff’s table, I recalled a man I met about 10 years ago in Edinburgh, Scotland, who also had a memory issue. I met him in the Elephant Cafe, which a sign by the door advertises as the “Birthplace of Harry Potter.” You cannot be a tourist and pass a coffee house with such a claim to fame.

I ordered my coffee and then walked back to the seating area. The table where Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling wrote was in a corner beside a large window. The view out the window must have have inspired her, for magnificent Edinburgh Castle loomed high above (see the view in the video below). The table where she wrote was occupied, so I asked a man if I could join him at one nearby. He was dressed nicely and well groomed. He looked very much like the actor Raymond Burr in his later years.

I sipped my coffee and wrote some notes for a story I would write about the place. But the man also wrote, virtually nonstop, in a thick blank journal. His handwriting was tiny, and there were no paragraphs. An entire page would be filled with only his handwriting.

I asked him if he were a writer. “No,” he said. “I just write down whatever I’m thinking or whatever’s happening.” And he continued to write.

A minute or so passed. I said something about his unusual style – one long, never-ending paragraph. He then put down his pen and told me his story.

He had been in a serious traffic accident a few years before. While he had fully covered physically, his brain was permanently affected, leaving him with a mere ten-minute memory.

Every day he would ride the bus to the Elephant Cafe — he could remember how to do that — take a table, and write. He was very calm — a quiet man, focused intensely on his journal. “Do you read later what you write?” I asked. “No,” he said with no further explanation.

MY COFFEE WAS NOW GONE and I had much to see, but I had a final question for him. “If I leave right now and come back in ten minutes you won’t recognize me, is that right?” He said yes, he would not remember that we had ever met.

I snapped a few photos of the man, but they are lost now, and the article I wrote is buried somewhere in my files. So I can’t even tell you his name. I wonder if he’s still alive. If you have visited the Elephant Cafe in recent times and have seen him, then please tell him hello from a man who met him a decade ago. If he’s been writing all this time, I’m sure whatever he wrote about me is many volumes back. It would be a thrill to track him down, or find his journals, and see what he wrote.

Thinking about that day now makes me feel good. Writing about people is what brings me the greatest pleasure.

Below is an interview of J.K. Rowling from a long time ago taken at the same table I told you about above.