COVID Senior Lockdown, Day 31

What day is it? I’m running into that comment all the time as I call and Zoom and text with people. We’re all losing chronological context. The brilliant Mrs. F reminded me of something today.

Some years ago, her mother suffered a small stroke. It didn’t physically debilitate her. But it hit a part of her brain hard and she developed a condition called anomia. If you learned Latin in Catholic school like we did, you know that means without names. She had trouble finding the nouns for Things, a frustrating process for her not unlike the less serious challenge we had the other night trying to put a name to the fat bald guy who was named Paul Reiser. Ants became “little animals in the kitchen” because she couldn’t find “ants” in her library. It was easy to mistake her condition, especially at her age, for dementia.

Then we noticed that she was losing recall of recent events. Another sign of dementia? That’s what her docs thought. But Mrs. F did not agree. She did a ton a research and worked with her mother to figure out that the brain attaches memories to Things. “I went to lunch Thursday at Dead Freddie’s.” Easy enough. But if you can’t pull up the words for lunch, Thursday, or Dead Freddie’s (her favorite lunch restaurant), then you’ve got no anchors. The memory of the event becomes squishy and imprecise and doesn’t stick. And there you are. It was a curse on an active mind. She struggled mightily against it, and her stubborn, smart daughter gave us a name for it.

We are suffering from a similar circumstance. No anchors. No commutes, no weekly meetings, no school schedule, no alarm clocks, no regular grocery days. Here in Gunpowder World, the only regularity in our calendar is the great guys and gals who pick up our detritus. Monday is trash day and we have to get the cans out the night before because they come in the wee hours. Thursday is recycle day and we need to get them out by 8 am because they come around 9. These are our benchmarks now. Trash day and recycle day. Don’t be late, and leave the guys and gals a chilled six now and again.

Why is everybody taking their walks in the evening? Aren’t they all stuck at home all day? How about spacing this out? There’s a traffic jam at the corner and they’re not 6 feet apart!!!!! Sheesh.

The missus is digging into the records again. She played Robbie Robertson’s self-title LP from 1987. As long as he'd been around (1950s) and as long as it had been since The Band broke up (1977-ish), it’s hard to believe this was his first solo album. Excellent. Then we rocked to String Driven Thing, a pretty damn obscure 70s band that more or less replaced a drummer with a fiddler. A different sound that kicks ass. I love the eponymous first LP. Find it if you can. Now, as I finally hit Post on this thing, we are enjoying Willie Nelson’s The Great Divide. Man, Willie has reinvented himself a thousand times, and he and Rob Thomas did a masterful job on this rendition. Find it. Shoot, didn’t Post quick enough. I’m losing continuity. She just put on the Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1. Now I gotta go. Let’s dance, baby!