Friday Afternoon

[nightdog_barks]

I did finish Alex Witchel's All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother's Dementia. With Refreshments the other day, and, for lookfar, yes, it is worth reading, but under a different title -- The Autobiography of Alex Witchel, because that's really what it is, up to and including her mom's illness. So imagine if you will The Dick Van Dyke Show, only with Rob Petrie as a cold and distant, emotionally abusive dad and Laura Petrie as an acquiescent mother, and you've pretty much got it. Her father is really pretty much absent from the book, and when he does show up, it's as a guy who seems to never have wanted to be married, much less had kids, in the first place. That said, Witchel is my age (55), and her attempts to deal with her mom's condition (vascular dementia, most likely brought on by an undiagnosed series of transient ischemic events, or "mini-strokes") ring absolutely true. It's not really the main story, though, and I would have preferred much more of that to the tale of her courtship and marriage to Frank Rich.

SO. I am now reading Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. It is very good, but I find myself skimming whole paragraphs because King apparently thinks that if one or two examples of a thing is good, fifteen is better. :D

Comments

[hannah]

I just finished Where I Was From by Joan Didion, which broke my heart for California, and began Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit. Have you read any Solnit? She has a strong tuning for the world itself, not just the point of view she inhabits.

[nightdog_barks]

Yes, Rebecca Solnit! I read her River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West a couple of years ago and loved it. :D

[taiga13]

Hello, I just got back from a hike. Last week we saw a Clark's nutcracker, and today we saw a couple of gray jays. Driving back we saw two coyotes too. Now I'm going to sit by the fireplace.
I saw an article in Slate recently by a woman writing about her own dementia.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/family/2014/03/dementia_and_aging_diary_of_a_sufferer_of_microvascular_disease.html

[nightdog_barks]

Oh, I love gray jays! I've never forgotten the first time we went to Banff and drove up to Lake Louise, we were sitting on a park bench and the gray jays would come up to us REALLY CLOSE, and they were like "HI WE'RE CUTE LITTLE BIRDS DON'T YOU THINK YOU SHOULD FEED US?" :D

That is one scary article! I'm pretty sure my dad had vascular dementia at the end of his life, and it is an absolutely terrifying illness.

[taiga13]

My grandmother had vascular dementia too. It is scary especially the part about how people with university educations decline twice as fast as those without!