Contemplating the Coming Age of Alzheimer's

Image from source, New Republic

My family has been relatively free of dementia. I think our tickers get us before dementia can. The only relative I'm aware of who had the disorder was my Dad's mother, my favorite Grandmother. She was the pie-baking, pancake-making, cuddly, loveable grandma.  She was one of the sweetest people I've ever known, and everyone loved her.

The last time I spent the night at her house was as an adult, with my near-in-age cousin, Becky. She had lost her husband of over 50 years, and her oldest child within a month or so. And on this visit, it was clear that there was something wrong with Grandma. Actually, there had been for some time, but all inquiries were brushed off by closer family members as her being hard of hearing, of having experienced such loss. It was just age, confusion, and the hearing thing. But it wasn't. It clearly wasn't.

I moved 2,000 miles away a short time later, and not long after that, Grandma was put into a home. Her issue wasn't Alzheimer's, or at least I don't think so. While she did lose her connection to the present, and her ability to remember who anyone was, her personality was intact. Her idioms were the same. And I swear, there was a brief flash of recognition when I and my long-divorced parents walked in to visit her. It didn't last, and she spent the rest of the visit trying to set the two of them up together, but the sadness I felt for her plight was buffeted a little by her seemingly sunny disposition. She didn't seem bothered by her confusion. Which is something.

Unfortunately, that was my one and only visit to see her in the home. I could throw out a bunch of excuses, and my distance away, but the fact is, I was scared. I didn't want to see her that way. And the built-in distance on that side of the family due to divorce just made it that much easier to rationalize. Grandma's remaining sons, my dad and my uncle, plus all of her in-town grandkids could take up the slack.  It was rather cowardly of me, and I do regret it. And yet, I still make the rationalization that she wouldn't have remembered anyway. Small solace.

All of that is a rather long way to go, to tell you that I read the article below, and was very moved by it. And I'm known as being almost completely unsentimental. The issue of dementia and Alzheimers is due to become much more pronounced over the coming years and decades. Maybe you (and maybe even I) can do a little better dealing with it than I have.

[Excerpt]
 
We Are Entering the Age of Alzheimer's

Try as we do, us Americans still croak. One and all, somehow, even today. We are done in by ten likely suspects: heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes. Nephritis. Suicide. Yet we can and do fight these things. We have working cures, preventive regimens, ways to halt the damage for all of these commonest causes of death. All of them, that is, save one. Alzheimer’s disease is practically unheard of in adults younger than 40. . .
Read more at: New Republic

News of the Weird: Woman Ages from 23 to 73 in Days

Wow. Just wow.

[Excerpt]

Nguyen Thi Phuong, Vietnamese Woman, 'Ages' 50 Years In Days
   



The thought of going from age 23 to age 73 can be pretty daunting, but could you imagine going through the physical 50 year aging process in a matter of days?

Nguyen Thi Phuong was 23 years old when she switched medications to treat an itchy allergic reaction to seafood. A mixture of drugs left her skin sagging and wrinkled in a matter of days. . .

Read more at: Huffington Post

Age: What a Concept

Katherine Helmond gets a lift in
Terry Gilliam's Brazil

This morning, while getting ready for my day, it occurred to me that January is ending, and that February is sort of a big month for the family. My Mom's, Step-dad's and brother-in-law's birthday are in the first three weeks, and the parents are having their fortieth anniversary. They got married when I was four, so that means it has also been forty years since I entered the public school system. Kindergarten in 1971.

My mind--which works like one of Jessica Tate's soliloquies*--hopped from the arrival of February, to important dates, to forty years ago, to omigod in forty more years, I'm going to be really old! If I'm even alive at all!  Then, my mind got a little sad. A little verklempt. I mean, geez, 1971 was a long time ago and everything, but I remember it. Some of it I remember pretty well. And while it's conceivable that I do have forty (or even more) years left--particularly since I quit smoking**--I can't say that for very much longer, can I?

I'm sure that everybody comes to these realizations, and that everyone has their own way of dealing with it. When the future calendar pages can only be realistically read as 20 more years, 10. . .will I really freak out? Or will it just be one of those things you eventually absorb? I suppose I should listen to the more reasonable side of my brain that knows I could die tomorrow (I can't use the "hit by a bus" metaphor. It actually happened to someone I know. Really).  And I'd imagine that at certain ages. . .at least if the body or brain is giving out. . .you might not want to go on for 10 or 20 more years.

One of the more interesting things about aging today, is watching the generation ahead of mine (I'm early Generation X), the Baby Boomers, fight aging tooth and nail. When they hit their 40s and 50s, they didn't automatically get the old lady dress, the grandpa pants, the Brylcreem, the granny hairdo and shawl, like many of their parents did. It didn't hurt that the Boomers were the generation of rock & roll and counter culture. Knocking trends was what they did. Well, that, and plastic surgery became a little more acceptable.

My own parents are still going pretty much full blast all the time. My bosses--two ladies--are Boomers, and they're still going strong. Almost everyone I know born in the forties and fifties defy the image I had of "old people" when I was a kid. Ask most of them, and they probably wouldn't consider themselves old, and might get indignant at the suggestion. Turn on the news, and check out the commercials: Viagra. Boniva. Knee Replacements. Heart medicine. But look closely at all the actors pitching that stuff. Perky Sally Field, butch guys climbing mountains, the studly silver fox and his cougar in side-by-side bathtubs on the beach. Yeah, I don't get that last one either, but you see what I'm getting at. Basically, I'm feeling the same age as the Boomers, and I'm a generation behind them!

What they're probably going to do is, they're going to wear us out. We're going to see a whole generation ahead of us clinging to youth, eventually losing the battle anyway, as we all will. And we Gen-Xers are gonna throw up our hands and say, "why bother!" We'll hitch up our branches to our armpits, get our horn-rimmed glasses with the chain, black socks and sandals. . . It ain't gonna be pretty!

Notes:

* The Katherine Helmond character on Soap always talked in a verbial hopscotch: "I know what I know, but I don't know what I don't know, but I do know that I don't know. You know?" What's more, there's a Benson character in my head too, and he understands.

** Wrapping up 28 days! Woohoo!  Pass the cold turkey, who says it can't be done.

Netflix, the Cast of Soap and Old Age

This weekend, I cashed in an offer from the mail. Usually, I throw out junk mail, but I paused when I came across a free month of Netflix. After all, we just got a new wireless internet capable Blu-ray player for Christmas, and Netflix is one of the features it came ready with. Even if I forget to cancel, it's only $7.95 a month, which is pretty darned reasonable right there.

It's pretty nifty. You set up Netflix on your computer, load up movies on their web page, and poof! they appear in your Blue-ray player like magic! I'm sure in five or ten years, the process will be even slicker, and probably taken for granted. But for now, it's very cool. But right away, I discovered a built-in limitation. After just a few searches, I realized that much of Netflix's library is "DVD Only," which means you have to sign up for the $2-per-month extra service where they mail the DVD to you. $2 isn't much, but it's not nearly as convenient, and I can't imagine it is very cost effective. I predict that eventually, Netflix (or its successor) will be 100% online.

Anyway, the service is really pretty awesome, but has the potential to become just one more time waster. I got my feet wet watching episodes of the brilliant but cancelled Better Off Ted. And then somehow, I got trapped in an all-day marathon of the 70s sitcom, Soap. In two days, I think I'm up to episode 15. Of course, that's at 22 minutes a pop, so it's not all that bad. The show holds up remarkably well, retaining every bit of the humor it always had. It is of course not as risque as we remember (the Moral Majority would pass out from today's HBO and FX shows). And the 70s fashions and decor dates the show. Just think of it as That REAL 70s Show, and get past it. There's comedy gold here.

The show of course featured Billy Crystal as TVs first regular out gay character, though they weren't 100% accurate in dealing with it. Baby steps, right? It was still groundbreaking. The cast was absolutely stellar, particularly the older people in the cast (as opposed to the unevenly talented younger ones). Katherine Helmond as daffy Jessica Tate, Cathryn Damon as sensible Mary Campbell, Robert Mandan as philandering Chester Tate, Richard Mulligan as loopy Burt Campbell, and Robert Guillaume as sardonic butler Benson was a cast any show would envy. The other standouts for me were Ted Wass as sexy but dumb Danny and Jay Johnson as Chuck (and Bob the dummy) Campbell.

But the most stunning thing for me (besides the amount of time I spent watching it) was the age of the principal cast. This show originally aired when I was eleven years old. While I didn't completely get it then, I absolutely loved the show in its original run. And to me, Jessica, Mary, Benson, Burt and especially Chester weren't just older. They were old. Of course, my mother was 29 at the time, more in line with Jennifer Salt or Diana Canova (the Tate daughters). So the others were practically the age of my grandparents. 

Today, I am 44 years old, and The Other Half is 49. We both have birthdays within the next 5 months, so both of us will reach milestones of a sort. And both of us will bracket each Soap cast member in the photo above! Now, neither of us is anywhere near as youthful looking as we were when we met in 1998. But neither of us looks old enough to be any of those people! I'm going to be the same age as Chester Tate??? Sorry, Mr. Mandan. I know you're still out there, and got to have a career where you basically looked the same age for thirty years, so I'm really not knocking you. But wow. This life thing is really starting to speed up!

Blast from the Past: Grace Slick

Image from source, Spinner

I don't often repost items I find on AOL's home page, since any AOL user has already seen them. But then, how many people still use AOL (besides me, of course)? So when I saw this picture of Grace Slick (former lead singer for Jefferson Airplane and Starship), I was moved to pass it along. I remember once talking with my mom about the big singers of her generation. So many it seemed were about the same age as she was. We agreed that it would be comforting to the boomers to have so many famous people their age when they entered their senior years. I'll have to see if she still feels that way, or if it just makes her feel old!

[Excerpt]

Twisted Tales: Grace Slick Exemplifies 1960s Hedonism -- Going on Six Decades

Side One of the Jefferson Airplane's classic 1967 album 'Surealistic Pillow' gets a heavy workout in the Coen brothers' latest film, 'A Serious Man,' loosely based on the directors' own coming-of-age in suburban Minnesota in the era of acid rock. Bar mitzvah boy Danny listens to 'Somebody to Love' on transistor-radio earphones to get through Hebrew school. . .

Read more at: Spinner

Ann Coulter to Stop Writing Books?

Photo from source, Raw Story

I've tried to read some of Ann Coulter's books. I didn't want to pay for them, of course, so twice I've checked them out at the library. The first one was Slander. I read the first few pages, and then quickly found myself skimming. Eventually, I headed off to the index to see if there was anything interesting by topic. I gave up shortly thereafter.

The next one could have been Godless. Or Treason. Or How to Talk to a Liberal, or maybe Godless. It's hard to say, because they are very, very similar. And all--at least to me--unreadable. As I said, I've only checked out two of her books, but I've flipped through most of the others. I often thought she could do just as well to shuffle a few chapters around, change a word here and there, and just slap another pithy title on it. Bingo! New book.

Maybe others have started to think the same thing. Ann the man has been seeing some drastically reduced book sales of late, even with them practically being given away on conservative sites, and with Ann constantly trying to stir up free publicity. So, it would seem she's giving up. Isn't that sad?

[Excerpt]

Op-Ed: Ann Coulter's Swan Song

Conservative critic on why Coulter can't, won't write new book

In a BookTV interview postponed from February and airing last weekend, author Ann Coulter said that she will probably stop writing books, citing increasing taxes on the rich by the Obama administration. . .

Read more at: Raw Story

Bush Regrets Being a Warmonger?

First photo official White House Portrait

Second photo from source, TimesOnline

George W. Bush has regrets? Really? Well, sort of, but he doesn't so much regret being a warmonger as having appeared to be one. At least that's how I read this story. Mostly, I'm struck by the picture. At the end of a President's last term, there is often talk about how much the 4 or 8 years has aged them.

In this case (as you can see in the two photos), this is certainly true.

[Excerpt]

President Bush regrets his legacy as man who wanted war

President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq. He said that his aim now was to leave his successor a legacy of international diplomacy for tackling Iran. . .

Read more at: Times Online