How do I know you're you?

I was watching an old YouTube clip of musicians doing an impromptu street concert in New York City.

Then, at :46, I spotted my father in the crowd!

My father died in 1980. I haven’t “seen” him for 41 years, but this man had his build, his eyes, nose, white hair. He was even wearing clothes my father would have worn, clothes my mother would have picked out for him; he was in a leisure suit. (So it would have been before the time I asked why he was dressed like a pimp, and he glared at my mother and never wore it again.)

But it really wasn’t my father. (I’m pretty sure.) For one thing, my mother wasn’t next to him in the crowd. There is no way my father would have been in that situation – an impromptu street concert! – or remained in that situation – without my mother, and she wasn’t there. (I’m pretty sure.)

So there’s this duplicate Dad, and I know it’s not him. (I’m pretty sure.) So it leaves me wondering: what is it that makes someone someone? What is it that would make me sure that man in the movie was my father?

When I was pregnant, I read that mothers could find and identify their babies by their smell. After Sophie was born, I spent a lot of time sniffing her, memorizing her. My postpartum existential worries included whether or not I could pick her out of a crowd of babies.

I’ve read about animals and birds that throw an intruder baby out of their nest, that they can tell if it’s not one of theirs. Yet, in reading The Lost Family by Libby Copeland, a wonderful book about DNA tests, there was one terrifying photo of a cartful of babies in a Manhattan maternity hospital. The babies were collected from the mothers – without little name bracelets! – and then redistributed after baths. Apparently, a big, switched-at-birth mix-up occurred. Aiiieeee!

Well, now, I would know my daughter anywhere. When she was in a play in costume and whirled around the stage, I’d just hunt for the blond ponytail … and end up tracking Seline, who also had a blond ponytail. Seline’s parents had the same problem. And recently, in a photo she shared of her friends all dressed up at a wedding, I asked, “Who’s the one in the middle?” and it was my own daughter.

So what makes us us? How do we recognize each other?

When I would visit my parents after a long time away, I would search the airport as I disembarked with a certain bit of panic pumping my heart: would I know them? Sometimes they’d look different, they’d aged, and I’d hunt for their “them-ness.”

Okay, this may be complicated by my own prosopagnosia, facial blindness. My brain has trouble processing faces into memory unless I can link it with posture, gait, expression, hair style, voice, etc. Unfortunately, my worst case involved a boss: I would show up every Monday after a weekend off and introduce myself to the “stranger” in the office. Sometimes I just stay home because it’s too stressful to run into people I’m supposed to recognize.

One benefit of Covid and mask-wearing is that finally, I can ask people who they are without risking social gaffes. I used to cover my cluelessness by blaming it on sunglasses, bike helmets, hair styles, poor lighting, or anything else I could claim…. Now I just blame it on the mask.

In the midst of my mother’s dementia, she’d often fake it, offer exuberant hellos to friends when she had no idea who they were. So that’s a memory thing; she couldn’t remember them. But I remember my father, and in photos from my childhood, I know that’s him. Is it because I was there, I know the situation, the environment, or is there something I see?

And would I be able to see it and recognize it 41 years later if he showed up in a video on YouTube?

Dare to Spell

You can tell it’s October because eventually I start focusing on words and their spelling. Not the usual focusing, but FOCUSING. It’s the BizBee, the annual adult spelling bee to benefit the Alaska Literacy Program, and I’ve been doing it for 28 years.

This is one tradition that enriches and delights my Third Third. I will never get tired of it.

This is the fun of the evening: spelling teams wait for me to give them “their” word. They confer for 20 seconds and then one of them has to stand up and spell the word before the buzzer sounds. If the word stumps them, they can pass that word to the rival team of their choice … if they donate $100 to the Literacy Program.

All the teams made it through the first round. But then things went haywire: the ALP Board of “Direcktors” lost the rhythm of synchronous, and the MENSA “ComMENSAlists” (Yes, I had to look it up.) failed the Olympic pentathlon. What?!? The 2016 champions were out in Round 2? No worries: they produced their TeamSaver, the secret, one-of-a-kind, Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for having sold the most raffle tickets.

The ACLU team of Lady Liberty and her bodyguards passed isinglass to the Arctic Entries team, and they burst into song. Apparently, in Oklahoma!, the “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” has “isinglass curtains y’ can roll right down/In case there’s a change in the weather.”

Do you see why I love this event?

From there, the rookie team from Ravens’ Roost Cohousing was uprooted by poinsettia, which unleashed a cacophony of caws and wildly flapping ravens around the room. Quoth the raven: Nevermore. (So relentless were the ravens, they went home with the Outstanding Spirit Award.)

And then it was the United Way’s turn to don the lederhosen. Except that shock must have overtaken the speller because she rose to spell and … didn’t. The buzzer went off; confusion reigned. Other teams shouted, “Let her spell!” Even some of the Killer Bee judges joined in. Soon the whole audience was stamping and shouting, “Let her spell!” In the interest of quelling an insurrection, the Pronouncer agreed to let her spell.

This had never happened before! There are rules! But like spelling itself, rules are broken.

But who could spell after that whole uproar? The lederhosen were doffed … just in time for the babka wars. First National Bank Alaska sent the sweet bread to MENSA, whose speller did not like babka but could spell it. The definition referred to babka’s raisins, but – as pointed out to the Pronouncer – good babka is chocolate. Seinfeld knows that.

Round 2 ended with the deflation of Providence’s Health Literacy Heroes’ pneumatic tire. Not with a whimper, but a bang.

Round 3 promised improvement with ameliorate going to DOWL, but it was tough getting through the pronunciation: alemiorate? armiliolate? lemirorate? It was all up for grabs. I don’t think I’ll ever hear the word again without laughing. Next, the kovsh ladle was passed from team to team, leaving 1st National Bank Alaska to go out in a very non-blasé way. Right after that, Alaska Airlines and their ALP volunteers heard the music of the spinet and ConocoPhillips died quietly, in a very innocuous way.

Three rounds and eight teams out! Spelled-out teams littered the risers.

The ACLU couldn’t persuade themselves to hold out past hoomalimali, but then the Dutch man – mynheer – visited the Arctic Entries team. BizBee fans will remember the hilarity of last year’s event when the Rosie the Riveters spelled the German schnecke and elaborated in German. I retold this story as Arctic Entries sent mynheer on his way, and one of their team answered in Dutch. (Who are these spellers?!?)

The ServiceMaster SpellMASTERS couldn’t float on the nenuphar, and meanwhile someone let the dogs out on the Anchorage Daily News team. It started with the schipperke, then the keeshond, and they were still standing. It was the barukhzy that finally bit.

The Arctic Entries wizards (“exSPELLiarmus”) took great pleasure in schadenfreude. It isn’t just Oklahoma! They said there’s a song called “Schadenfreude” in Avenue Q: “And when I see how sad you are/ it sort of makes me...happy!” Broadway musicals for spelling lessons!

The herb of gilia was passed from team to team, ultimately landing in oblivion as there were no more teams left to pass it. And then the cataclysm began: The Unitarian Universalists went belly up with the scalare, MENSA played out on the clavecin, Arctic Entries couldn’t see through their hyaloid word, and Holistic Hands’ Rosie the Riveters sat the vigil at the agrypnia. But when everyone dies, everyone comes back in the game.

Alas, even the chocolate babka lovers of the MENSA team couldn’t protect them from forastero, and the Rosie the Riveters – last year’s champions – drowned in the epilimnion.

It was down to two: the Unitarians and Arctic Entries. The Unitarians smelled out on propiophenone, and Arctic Entries danced out to allemande. But again, when everyone dies, everyone comes back in the game.

The jury went out for the Unitarians with venire, but the singing Arctic Entries team sang a cappella and faced their championship word: could they survive on pignolias? Yes, new champions for 2018!

Direction Unclear

I lack direction.

Well, in addition to that, I mean I lack a sense of direction. I have been known to make four right turns and be utterly mystified that I came back to where I was. So negotiating a new place takes practice.

In New York, this is how I leave a subway or a building: I walk outside and strain to see the next street sign over. If I’m at 15th Street, and I can see 16th, I know that way is uptown. I am oriented! If I’m looking for an avenue, that’s harder because they’re longer and you can’t see the next one. So you look for the next street, aim yourself uptown, and then you know the avenues on your right and left. Unless you’re at Broadway, which runs diagonally. Or the avenues which suddenly give up numbers and become Madison, Park, and Lexington. Or Lexington, Madison, then Park? I scramble them every single time.

Invariably, I end up walking the wrong way and asking a stranger which way is Fifth.

Ah, but on the subway, I know my connections! I see a map in my head. That’s ON the subway. IN the subway station is a whole other story. Getting out of a station or transferring to another subway line within a station is a true challenge. Yes, after a while, you get the routine movements down, but a new station is always a new puzzle.

I couldn’t get from the F train to the 6 train until I found a man at an elevator with a little sign on it that said “To 6 platform.” When I got to the platform, other people were arriving, but I have no idea how they got there. I’ve looked and looked, but as far as I know, the elevator is the only way. But that can’t be true.

Some station arrows make it easy. Go up the stairs to the left or right.

But there are arrows that make it confusing. Does this mean you should turn around for the elevator? Or straight ahead and turn right? (Or jump up and down?)

Arrows combined with environmental cues (like stairs) are easier.

I think this one means “go around the big elevator box in the middle of the platform.” But that may explain why I could never find the 6 without the elevator.

Arrows without environmental cues are confusing. This next is the Big One, the source of much subway misdirection: Does this arrow mean up or straight ahead?

I have come across tourists looking for the stairs up where there are none. I have missed going up because I was aiming for straight ahead. The problem is the “up” and “straight ahead” arrows are identical. I propose a solution:

The longer ones mean “Go far ahead, into the distance.” They could even be grayed out as they stretch further ahead. What do you think? Will this work?

Driver Ed: Third Third Style

Driver Ed in our First Third: harrowing films of terrible car accidents, screeching brakes, bodies burnt to crisps.

Driver Ed in our Third Third: harrowing statistics like, “Seniors aged 65 and over are more than twice as likely as younger drivers to be killed when involved in a crash;” that we need 20 times more light to see at night at age 40 than at age 20; that deaths in crashes start increasing around ages 60-64.

I decided to click on all those AARP emails about saving 30% for a limited time only – with a promo code! – on the Smart Driver™ online course so I’d get an insurance discount. It looked easy enough: there were six units, and it would take about four hours. I could do it on my own schedule.

The man and the woman instructors said this was all about change: we and our bodies are changing, our cars are changing, and road conditions are changing. It became clear that I wasn’t the only one in my Third Third: my 2001 Subaru was in its Third Third. It doesn’t have half the gizmos new cars have. Gizmos may make driving safer, but gizmos apparently also add to the confusion.

Right off, the novelty impressed me. The instructors switched from video to PowerPoint-looking things, to little interactive games. I had to click on the little clouds to see how many deaths per 1,000 crashes occur at each age.

Right away, we hit my personal fear factor: vision. Older drivers have trouble with glare, with switching from looking out the windshield to looking at the dashboard, to seeing contrast. I already know dusk is the roughest time for me driving. In a car, I’ve learned it’s hard to switch from the road to the cheat sheet with my directions written on it.

I’ve written about my “Agony at the Eye Doctor,” but this course put eye doctor agony in my car. They described a vision test I’d never even had: contrast sensitivity. I’d better tell my eye doctor about that. I have a new thing to worry about.

But vision wasn’t enough: we had to move on to the big fear factor: brain health. As we age, we experience changes in “memory, processing speed, attention, and brain regulation skills – overall executive function” – Oh, no! She named the nightmares! If driving is a complex balancing act, “the idea that our mind isn’t working as well as it used to can be frightening.” You think?

Okay, a bit of First Third explanation: As a teenager, the week before my road test for a driver’s license, I was out practicing with my mother. At the top of a hill, an inattentive driver was on the wrong side of the road and rammed into me head-on. In a big old Buick, the engine sat in the front seat with us, and my face went into the steering wheel.

I decided I wasn’t going to drive. Ever. Cars were tons of weaponry on the road, and “other guys” were everywhere.

This continued for a couple years until my parents were tired of chauffeuring me everywhere. So I learned to drive. Unwillingly. Hence, a happy career in public transit and a love affair with buses and street cars.

Living in Anchorage, having a child, having to be places – driving is what I do now. It’s what my mother did, too, which worried her kids a lot. The course talks about that, about how to have The Conversation with a person who shouldn’t be driving.

Mostly, the course upped my attention, always a good thing. Meanwhile, I got to click on icons, click on highway signs, and click on talk bubbles. I got to move the car into the right garage. I wouldn’t call it a video game, but I did win dollars off on my car insurance.

Can you spell it?

When it’s October, it’s BizBee time, so that means I get to pronounce the words in the Alaska Literacy Program’s annual adult spelling bee. Friday was an exciting night of tragic misspellings, surprise saves, and astounding turns in the action. Teams of spellers took over Anchorage’s social scene and made it a night to remember. What? You don’t believe this? Well, then you weren’t there.

It started off tame enough; all teams made it through the first round. But very, very quickly, things went very, very wrong. In Round 2, the ALP Board’s “ALPabets” forgot their innate abilities and lost their innate direction. Suffering from proximity, the very next team, Advance Supply Chain “Spellerifics” – Leaders in Literacy and a rookie team – debated mootable but lost their voice. (Unlike the Arctic Entries “Spellephants,” who continued to shriek like elephants throughout the night.)

But the contagion of Round 2 did not stop there. Providence Health & Services – the “Health Literacy Heroes” – must have eaten some bad quiche; no super powers could save them. Not even being a Distinguished Leader in Literacy.

Disaster continued into Round 3 as the “Dewey Decimators” of Anchorage Public Library hung themselves with lariat. The UAA Center for Human Development – the “Incred-Abilities” decked out in hero disguise – just couldn’t dance their way out of odori.; and First National Bank Alaska, a Distinguished Leader in Literacy, suffered from an extravaganza of syllables and “A’s.”

Round 3 and already six teams down! Would this be a 45-minute BizBee?

Things started to get interesting in Round 4 as the Unitarian Universalists “In Fred’s Name” (honoring long-time ALP volunteer Fred Hillman) passed the snowstorm of purga to the ALP Volunteers. (BizBee rules: you can do that with a $100 donation to literacy.) The Volunteers in turn passed it on to the ACLU’s “Ye Olde Autocorreck.”

The ACLU team, sensing defeat, appealed to their supporters in the audience for $100 to help them buy a Word Pass … to no avail. Resigned to their fate, they accepted purga and faced the storm in Round 5. Wait, was there time for a last-minute reprieve? With donations of $200 now in hand, could they still pass the word? Our three judges, the Killer Bees of Walt Featherly, Sharon Richards, and Gretchen Bersch, ruled that out, and “Ye Olde Autocorreck” was lost in the snowstorm.

Things hummed along until Round 7, when the Werd Nerd pronouncer decided to spice things up by jumping ahead to word #267. “Oh, no! Not 267!” wailed the Mensa team of supporters in the audience (a joke the Werd Nerd continues to love). As it turned out, the Russians were responsible for word #267; they sent in the commissar to silence the “Spellephants” of Arctic Entries. (And by the end of the night, the Mensa crew would win the Team Spirit Award.)

The rookie team from Holistic Hands, the “We Can Spell It” Rosie the Riveters, were served schnecke, and the audience held their breath as they spelled it … correctly. As spellers and officials marveled, a Rosie told us – in German! – that her family eats schnecke for Thanksgiving! It was a magnificent BizBee moment.

Unfortunately, the wild hartebeest gored the ALP Volunteers – sponsored by ConocoPhillips as Distinguished Leaders in Literacy – and they fell down in Round 7.

Heroes were still dropping. In Round 8, the sheriff arrested last year’s champions, the Mensa “ComMENSAlists, with shrieval.

In Round 9, the “SpellMASTERs” of ServiceMASTER diverted the mudflow of lahar to the Rosies, but the dogs got them with Weimaraner in Round 10.

It was now a spell-off between “Fred’s” Unitarian Universalists and the Rosies. The Rosies had the knowledge of jnana, but the Fred’s had the uitlander’s help. It was neck and neck near the finish. But finally – in Round 14, the orichalcum pipe fell on the head of the Unitarians.

Wait, wait, wait! They’re still alive! They produced the TeamSaver – the secret, one-of-a-kind, Get-out-of-Jail-free card for having sold the most raffle tickets. The Unitarians were back in the game!

…only to be blinded in the very next round with periphacitis. The “We Can Spell It” Rosies had one chance to spell the championship word before mushroom poisoning might claim them: mycetismus … and the 2017 champions were decided! Rookies to champions in one night!

How long is eight minutes?

You too can expand Time. I did it by driving a race car.

Let me explain.

The latest in my various efforts to delay cognitive decline is researching Time. (You might think this is only evidence that cognitive decline has already begun, but I’m hoping the jury is still out.)

There’s the heavy-duty stuff of physics (Einstein and relativity and space-time and lots of things that don’t make normal sense) and there’s the less heavy stuff of psychology and the perception of time. Both are full of things that get titled “paradox” (“something that seems absurd but expresses a possible truth”).

Here’s an example about the perception of Time: Researchers say there’s a difference between how people describe the duration of time while something is still happening and how they judge it after it’s over. A boring wait may seem like it’s taking forever, but afterwards – since nothing interesting happened and you have no details in your memory – you judge it to be shorter. On the other hand, if you had an interesting experience with a lot of emotional color and time just flew, afterwards you have so many details to recount, it seems like it took longer. They call this the time paradox.

So now we’re at last weekend. Tim had a secret New Thing excursion for me: a trip to Extreme Fun Center in Wasilla. Ooh, what a discovery! This was right up my alley. I saw the sign that said “Cart Races” and I was in the building in no time (just an expression, not a paradox).

I LOVE speed and motion when there’s no chance of breaking my neck. Extreme Fun Center has whole bunches of arcade games and little kid soft areas, laser tag and birthday party rooms. But the big square footage is a racetrack with carts. The price: $20 for an 8-minute ride.

Sense of time duration before: “Yikes, that’s a lot of money for only eight minutes.  A measly eight minutes. This will be a rip-off.”

First we have to watch a 3-minute safety video. Then we put on black helmet liners and big helmets. Then we go out to our car. When we’re all buckled in, we’re activated.

Whoosh! It was amazing! I could go so fast I’d barely make the turns, then open up on the straightaway. Every turn took incredible concentration – when to speed up in the middle of it, when to keep from crashing into far walls. Zinging left, flying through a turn at maximum speed, correcting at the last second. It was so intense I think I fogged up my helmet’s visor.

Sense of time during: “Every muscle in my neck and shoulders is so tense and my heart is beating so rapidly, will I be able to last eight minutes? This is way more than eight minutes.”

When you’re physically excited and your heart rate picks up, time seems to slow down. This is the experience of slow motion during a car accident. While in the middle of the action, you’re sure it’s all taking a very long time even if you’re not experiencing slow motion.

Eventually, the checkered flag signaled the end of the race and we had to drive our cars back into the pit. I took off my helmet and became a babbling fool recapping every turn, spin, pass, and lap.

Sense of time after: “I got a great ride for eight minutes. Way cool!”

My continuing quest for New Things? It’s not just fun, not just anti-boring; it expands Time!

“Experiences that are exciting and new expand time. … The greater the store of lived experience—that is, the more emotional coloration and variety one’s life has—the longer one’s lifetime seems, subjectively.” – from Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time

Bring on the race cars!

Who is my mother?

A visit with my mother and my philosophical side runs rampant with questions. Now back home, I sit here and wonder about our “self-ness.” What makes me Barbara, and would I be Barbara if all the memories that I’ve collected over my life were gone? Is there some core of Barbara that has nothing to do with what I’ve experienced, seen, done, etc.?

So who is my mother now that she’s virtually memory-less?

When I’d asked before the trip whether I was still My Mother’s Daughter, one reader, The Noodler, commented that “she will know that you are someone important to her.” And yes, she did! When I walked in the room, her face lit up. She knew my sister and I were there to see her, not someone else in the dining room. So yes, I am still my mother’s daughter, but who is my mother?

Right now, she has a lump the size of a tennis ball on her forehead and black and blue marks lining her temple, cheek, neck, and under her eyes. Our guess is that she fell in the bathroom and her head hit the support bars on the toilet. We’d need an NCIS crime scene analyst to know what happened because my mother asks, “I fell? When did I fall?” So she is in rehab before returning to the dementia wing and her room.

On prior trips, I was intent on “rescuing” Mom from rehab so she could get back to her normal life. Now I know there is no rescue. While that relieves a lot of pressure, it also leaves these philosophical questions. At one point, my sister and I wheeled her onto the patio into the warm sun.

Still like my mother: She loves warm sun. She offers money so we can buy something nice. She doesn’t like raisins. She would be upset that she hadn’t been to the hairdresser.

Not like my mother:
My mother was a voracious reader and major movie-goer. She helped found a whole film center. She wrote poetry. Now she can’t read because by the time she gets to the end of a sentence, she can’t remember the beginning. She dozes off in movies. My mother was chatty with the energy of an Energizer Bunny. Now she sits and doesn’t really engage with her company. She sits. (But this is rehab after an injury and she’s not really just a sitter in her normal life, but still…)

When I look at myself, I think my self-ness is tied up in curiosity. I have questions about everything and find just about everything worth exploring and asking about. Who would I be if I just sat?

I took one reader’s advice and had a conversation with my mother, telling her the things I’d want her to know just in case I didn’t see her again. She appreciated it, I guess. It’s hard to tell because her responses are muted.

My mother never made an ethical will or legacy letter, but she communicated her values, loves, and hopes regularly. All her life. We know what her Mom-self thought and wanted.

But this later version Mom: Is she happy? Does she think about happiness? Is just sitting like interminable waiting or is it like being peaceful? Is this what she would want for her 90s?

I’m not sure she could answer these questions. In a quiet moment, I tried asking what she was thinking, but she looked confused and told me she wasn’t thinking at all. Should I have tried again? Should I have been more specific? But look at those happiness questions: they are insensitive if not harrowing questions. My memory-less mother is sitting in a chair and I’m going to ask her if life turned out the way she wanted?

Insensitive? Harrowing? Is that more about my fears or her happiness?

Still My Mother's Daughter?

I am leaving next week for New York to visit my mother. This may be the first time I see her and she’s not sure who I am.

Once before, she went to breakfast and returned a few minutes later saying, “I didn’t realize you were my daughter!” Someone at breakfast must have asked how her daughter’s visit was going, and Mom realized that the person sleeping on her couch was me. But that was only momentary; all her Barbara-memories quickly lined up.

But recently, when I talk to her on the phone, I feel like she’s “being happy” or “being nice.” I can’t really describe it, but I don’t feel the ring of truth. It’s most obvious with the “add-ons” to her four kids – spouses, grandchild – but I feel it with me, too. I could be a waitress she’s friendly to.

In July, we moved her into the dementia unit of her assisted living. She is much, much happier there since they provide the near-constant company she craves. No more wandering in the night looking for desk clerks and nurses to sit next to. She says it’s the “just right” place for her, and my siblings and I would be greatly relieved except….

Except that she’s frequently in the hospital for “unwitnessed falls” on her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. (Thank goodness her bones are so dense they never break.) My poor sister – the only contact in the same time zone – now sends emails to the rest of us with “Again” or “One guess” in the subject line.

My mother has always been the hub of our family’s wheel. When we all left home, we’d telephone Mom and get the updates on everyone else. If someone had good news, she’d pass it on. If someone was sad, she’d tell us to check in and rally her. She was the Master Link.

Now she’s still the connecting force amongst us, but it’s about her, not with her. She’s still central, but not The Center. And what she is for us is not joy, it’s worry. Concern. My sister clenches when my mother’s area code comes up on Caller ID. I clench when I see subject lines like “Again” or “One guess.” Or even just “Mom.”

My mother used to wear Blue Grass toilet water from Elizabeth Arden. (That’s what they called it.) She’d splash it on after a shower and ask us to get it for her for Mother’s Day. The smell of Blue Grass is Mom. A reader, Michele, suggested that smells might be good for her Memory Box so I will try that.

I am bringing the videos I’d made of her telling stories from her childhood. The woman in those videos is so startlingly Mom – her vitality, her wit, her language. I wonder whether seeing her younger self will be a pleasant experience or a disturbing one.

My last few visits with my Mom have been crisis visits or task visits. I have either gotten her out of rehab, nursed her through the flu, or bought supplies, fixed the car, organized the paperwork. I have hired personal aides, met with facility administrators, taken her to the bank. In between, we have played bingo, watched movies, and looked through albums; but at the end of the visit, my mother says, “This was a great visit. We accomplished a lot.”

“Accomplished a lot” because my mother’s main concern is that her life get handled around her. I don’t think she’d say “This was a great visit. We laughed a lot” because she forgets a photo the instant we turn the page, forgets a story the second it’s finished being told. But somehow, the comfort of being taken care of lingers.

I’d scheduled this trip as a pleasure trip. A simple, have-happy-times-together trip. But now she’s back in the hospital after another fall. She’ll probably be discharged in a couple of days. Maybe fall again and go back in. There are no simple, have-happy-times-together trips.

I don’t know what will happen “in the flesh.” This is the first in-person visit for any of us since July. Will my mother snap to recognition that I am her daughter Barbara or maintain that superficial friendliness I sense on the phone, that cover for not really being sure of things? Will there be a “Mom” there … or some kindly older woman? Am I still my mother’s daughter?

I guess I’ll see.

LOTS of food for thought

When my daughter started school and when she went to college, there was always just one thing I was watching out for: was her curiosity still intact? Was she still finding the world interesting and was that interest still motivating?

I ask the same of myself, but especially now in my Third Third. The idea of stagnation is anathema to me, and now it’s compounded by believing that curiosity fights off cognitive decline (and seeing my mother in New York leaves me especially worried about that).

Mostly, I’ve always been curious. My brain is like a garbage disposal that can’t turn off. With no food in it, it just whirls and grinds away relentlessly but pointlessly. But with food – and New York City provides SO MUCH food – it’s useful and productive. It processes.

Here are some of the things I’m wondering about now. I haven’t been able to sleep until I Google some of them, but I’ll probably need to check some books out of the library.

• In the Hayden Planetarium show “Dark Universe,” Neil deGrasse Tyson (one of my heroes), said that when things move away from us, their light waves “redshift,” that from our position in the universe, everything is moving away from us. He distinctly said that from ANY point in the universe, everything is moving away from it. How can that be? Something has to be in front of something. In fact, one of the panels mentioned the galaxy “in the foreground,” so wouldn’t it be chased by the galaxies in the background? This bothers me.

   
• During World War II, book publishers turned out 123 MILLION Armed Services Editions of little, skinny (but complete) versions of titles so soldiers could fit them in their pockets. The author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn received 10,000 letters from grateful GIs (according to the New York Public Library program by the author of When Books Went to War). I want to find a skinny book!

• From the American Museum of Natural History “The Secret World Inside You,” I discovered that a baby’s passage through the mother’s birth canal is crucially important to bathe it in valuable bacteria. Doctors are now looking at swabbing babies born through Caesarean section with the bacteria to prevent things like asthma and food allergies. I am SO GLAD I gave my daughter bacteria!


• In the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, I saw Jenny E. Sabin’s gorgeous, knitted pavilion. She made it of solar active yarns so it lights itself up at night. It is truly spectacular and my drawing wouldn’t do it justice so you can click through for more photos here. Just imagine being under it.

• I learned about Voronoi polygons at the Museum of Mathematics on Pi Day (3/14/16). If you have a few points and you divide them up so a region (shaped like a polygon) is closest to one point than any neighboring one, they’re Voronoi polygons. A bazillion kids on a field trip danced on a floor that changed shapes and colors every time a kid moved. John Snow, who identified the water pump that spread cholera in London (another hero of mine), used these to find the pump. He must have plotted all the deaths and saw they were closest to that one pump.

• A Jewish man in Georgia, Leo Frank, was sentenced to death for murdering a young girl. When evidence showed it couldn’t be him, the governor commuted the sentence, but a group kidnapped him from prison and lynched him. The group included the former governor, mayors, and state legislators. They were never punished, and they subsequently revived the KKK. I learned this at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

I realize this is all pretty boring, listed out like this. I learned from brilliantly designed exhibits, with things you could touch and see, bright graphics and clear visuals. My New York experience is mostly real life and real culture, and I pick up most of what I learn through osmosis (although I manage to forget that the D train is an express and I keep ending up on my way to the Bronx with no way to get off).

But these museums, these programs, these institutions are smoldering hubs for curiosity. I am really, really good at unearthing every program, talk, exhibit, tour, or event I can; the table is littered with flyers, newspapers, programs, and handouts.

I am a glutton and curiosity hog, New York is a never empty banquet, and I only have a month to feast.

Lab rat lost in the maze

Today I earned $21.50 as a guinea pig, a lab rat for the university’s Experimental Economics researchers.  I was told I’d earn $5 for participating, but that I could earn more based on the decisions I made during the study. (They said I couldn’t end up losing money.) This was a New Thing with real incentives, real decisions to be made! Plus I’d be furthering economics knowledge.

Since I was thinking so economically, I decided to walk to UAA and save money on parking. I didn’t want my hard-earned $5 to disappear down a meter. See, already I was practicing my economic decision-making.

Ten of us assembled in the Lab. We were told there’d be a bag of 20 poker chips, some black, some green. A roll of a die would determine how many of what color were in the bag. Then we’d have to draw a chip out.

If we drew out a black chip, we’d earn nothing. If we drew out a green chip, we’d earn $20. If we chose not to draw, we’d get $6. Okay, I could see what was happening: would I take the risk for the green chip or play it safe for the $6?

Then we took a little test about the instructions. We’d get 50¢ for each correct answer. Okay, pretty simple.

But then things got complicated. Another person was added to our scenario: if I were the only one who got a green, I’d get $40! If both of us got a green, we’d split the $40. The rules changed again: if he got the green first, my later green wouldn’t even count … and his first draw was secret. Then it was public. There were five scenarios in all, and things got really confusing.

Each time the rules changed, we had another little test about the instructions. Then we were told the statistical probability of each outcome. There were dozens of probabilities: any green chips, how many green chips, who goes first, etc etc. Tiny, little percentage numbers all over the place. I simplified; if I saw a 38% or better number anywhere, I’d go for it. If it were less than that, I’d decline to draw and get my $6.

We were told we could opt out or change any of our decisions, and then they rolled the dice. It came up that the bag was filled with 20 green chips – all green chips – so almost everyone won!

I have no idea why. I am clueless about the whole thing, but I have my little suspicions. In the psychology experiments I did in college, you’d think the test was about response time, and then you’d find out it was really a test about eye contact. Did the people who were granted eye contact by the tester report they found the experience more pleasant? It could be very devious.

I’m not sure what economic decision-making we demonstrated. I’d guess the professor must be a little irritated that the 20-green-chip option came up so he had to pay out lots of $20 bills. But whether any of what I did showed or didn’t show any rationality, I have no idea.

But this is the odd thing. After it was all done, we had to take a little anonymous, demographic survey: age, gender, student status. (I am SURE I was the only Third Thirder in the room.) But there were three additional questions on the survey: (Try your answers in the comments; spoiler alert below.)

1. If it takes 5 machines to make 5 widgets in 5 minutes, how long does it take to make 100 widgets?
2. If the lily pads in a lake double in surface area every day, and the lake is totally covered in 48 days, when is the lake half covered?
3. If a bat and ball cost $1.10 and the bat is $1 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

Now why would those questions be there with no names, no identifying numbers? Are they checking if we have minimal intelligence, and why would they do that after we finished the whole green-chip lab?

This is so mysterious to me that on my walk home, I kept wondering about it, rehashing it. Why did they ask those questions afterwards? Why did they also test us on the instructions? I was such a good little lab rat because I didn’t even know what maze I was in. Walking home, pondering, deliberating.

Then it hit me: the stupid ball had to cost 5¢ if the bat was going to be $1 more. $1.05 + 5¢ = $1.10. The only economics question I understood, and I’d gotten it wrong. Was that the test?

Memory loss ... or panic?

I know my Third Third brain has more wisdom in it, more experience, more calm reasoning. What it’s missing is retrieval, which makes sense because it’s full of so much more stuff. Sometimes the retrieval problem is a tip of the tongue issue. I know what I need to retrieve, I may even know what letter it begins with, but it’s just … elusive.

Other times, the retrieval problem is a total freeze-up. No sputtering, no flailing around trying out consonants, sounds, and mental images. It’s just a blank. Thought? Gone. I stand there like a hull missing innards.

Billy Collins has a wonderful poem titled “Forgetfulness.” It captures the retrieval problem perfectly:

    “as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
    decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
    to a little fishing village where there are no phones.”

If you haven’t heard it or read the whole poem, click on this right now.

While in New Orleans, we discovered a performance called “You Don’t Know the Half of It,” and it was their fourth anniversary show.  It’s comedy improv with a twist: one person in the on-stage pair has a script, and he follows it. The other person is clueless.

Okay, I’ve acted, I’ve been on stage a lot. I’ve done monologues, I’ve done comedy, but improv? No, that requires synapses that jump, really jump. I don’t think I’ve ever had that. Mostly people think I’m quick because I laugh really loudly at other people’s quick-wittedness.

The show was terrific. I laughed really loudly at everyone’s quick-wittedness. One person would come out knowing he was a refugee from an alien abduction, but his “son” had no clue. He fished around mightily for some thread he could follow, and the hilarity lay in how his efforts mismatched with the scripted actor.

But what was truly hilarious was the woman who hijacked the whole thing. If they didn’t give her a script, she’d create her own world and let the poor scripted guy try to catch her. It was a major ambush, and she pulled it off. I laughed really loudly at her quick-wittedness, too.

So there we were Saturday, our usual group of four women for the Alaska Literacy Program’s annual Scrabblers Scramble. The only relation the evening has to Scrabble is that we use the letter tiles on a board. Each round has a different rule and is only minutes long. Give me a time limit, and it might as well be improv. Jump, synapses, jump!

The first round was World Languages. The only words we could put on the board were World Languages. In five minutes.

Total freeze. We started with Mandarin, and we got Spanish and Dutch. I groped around the world, looking for countries and their languages, but the world had vaporized. Every language that emerged from the vapor required an H, and we only had two of them. Norwegian made it, and some others (which I can’t remember now). We tried frantically to open our mental file cabinets, but the keys were missing. The file room was missing. We tried looking around our interior maps of the world, but our brains had mysteriously emptied.

Of course afterwards, languages floated back. How could we have forgotten Japanese or the Alaska Native languages? Welsh! Persian! Korean! At least this confirmed they were still alive in our memory banks; it was just a retrieval problem. Either that or we were in shock.

I tried it on Tim: “Quick! Come up with any ten-letter word beginning with J.” Amazingly, he answered, “Jambalaya.” How did he do that?

I was surprised, but I did manage to count the letters. “That’s only nine.”

“Jambalayas,” he said.

Ha, ha, ha! (really loudly)

Gasp. Choke. Unwelcome adventures.

Oh, yikes, the wrong people have found me on the Internet. I am beyond upset. I am vibrating with agitation.

I was looking through my blog analytics, and I noticed that two of the blog visits had an extra bunch of letters in the URL. So I clicked on it.

It went to a fake version of my blog: no header, no right-hand side, just the words and drawings. I totally panicked: my computer must be crashing, I’d ruined its brains, my blog was disintegrating. So then I Googled just the extra letters, and it turned out to be on lots of other websites. Just inserted into them.

I asked Google, “What is XXXX?” but all I got was a homepage, written in Asian characters. The Chinese must be violating international copyright laws with my blog; I was a victim of cyber crime! I was also clearly out of my depth.

So then I had to figure out how to ask Blogger my questions, how to get on the “Forum.” Other people put their questions there, but I don’t even know the process.

Brief interlude for hysterical outburst:

I AM a tech dinosaur! There, I said it! I can’t get an answer to a question without negotiating another completely separate hurdle: I have to ask questions about how to post a question. And don’t even get me started on how am I supposed to receive the answers. Why does everything seem to lead to an endless trip down a technological rabbit hole?!?

Deep breath, deep breath. Remember: every hurdle is just another boost to maintain my cognitive abilities.

I figured out how to ask, and I asked. This morning, a very nice guy responded, and his little button said he was a “Google Expert.” Hooray! He said he couldn’t duplicate the result, could I tell him how I found the bad blog.

So I did my Google thing, and they were gone! Everything with that bunch of letters in it was gone except for the home page. So I checked my analytics again, and there was a third person going to that bad site! From Google! Oh, yikes, this was a mess. (Afterwards, I did figure out that was my Expert looking it up, but by this point, I was so freaked out, I felt like every incident was a cyber threat.)

I explained everything to my Google Expert, and he said “It looks like that site is taking content and hosting it on their server. You might want to contact the website owner to remove your content from their servers.”

Cyber thieves taking my stories and pictures! I was furious, but I worried that contacting them was like trying to unsubscribe from spam, that it confirmed to the bad guys that you were alive and then you’d never get rid of them. Not to mention that everything was in Asian characters. But my Expert told me to, so I went to their home page and clicked “Translate.”

Gasp. I’m even afraid to tell you what I found, that it will add me to their list again. Can I say they called themselves “erotic images” without the word “erotic” showing up in Google searches? (Too late.) And they’re sending people to a fake version of my blog! (Deep breath, deep breath.) I even feel icky touching my keyboard.

Immediately, I thought of the butt lineup from Costco, but that was a while ago. Why would I first hit their radar now? Oh, no! It must have been my butt peeing outside, hiding from the bus. Look here: is that an erotic image to you?

So I quickly replied to my Google Expert, asking him what I should do now, but he’s not responding! Maybe he’s checking my blog and Google will remove me! Already, “3rd Thirds” is only yielding searches about Third Graders. Here I am, in my Third Third, and I’m a Japanese porn attraction.

(sob)

Getting moving. Ugh.

At least in my Third Third, I’ve realized that the mood I have upon wakening does not have to be the mood that follows me around all day. I can try distraction (a movie), a good conversation, an activity outdoors. Sometimes a trip to Costco can cheer me up.

So what’s bugging me lately? I think I’m letting my body go down the tubes. I’m not getting enough exercise and seeing my mother’s dementia and knowing that exercise is the best way to hold onto cognitive abilities just makes me freak out about it even more.

So that’s why I’m sitting here writing about it.

Maybe it’s that the weather is transitioning to winter but there’s no snow for skiing. Maybe it’s that problem with my feet; they have some weird hurt. Maybe it’s that I can never remember what the lap swim hours are at the pool. But those aren’t even the issue. The issue is inertia.

[break while I went for a run]

Okay, things aren’t so bleak now. It’s just that physical exercise is low on my personal priority list. Tim has to exercise every day. It’s in his DNA or something. Me? I could lie down and blob out any hour of the day all day. I could idly skim magazines, do a crossword puzzle, make up a grocery list. I could even do laundry over physical exercise. In fact, I often feel highly motivated to do laundry.

I am never highly motivated to move my body. I have to play tricks on myself like getting into running clothes. Once I do that, it will happen. One friend once asked me if I’d be her dog. Friends with dogs have to take the dog out for a walk; maybe that would get us out.

But now, the fear of dementia is overwhelming. Not to mention that my body is starting to look like an old person’s body, and that’s of more immediate concern than dementia. As usual, If nothing changes, nothing changes. So I’m going to try a New Thing.

A few years ago, I came across an article in a magazine about the eight best cocktails in Anchorage. There were colorful photos and clever names for some of them. I don’t even drink, but I said, “Let’s do an Anchorage cocktail tour. We’ll do a different one every Friday.” What an incredible amount of fun! Our group grew every week, and I discovered things like little baby cocktail shakers. I also discovered things like drunk people in bars. Yikes!

Anyhow, at my athletic club, there are all sorts of classes I’ve never taken. Mostly at the athletic club, I take showers. I can’t stand the idea of getting hot and sweaty indoors. But other people do Zumba and Insanity and Cize. I have no idea what those are. I’ve done the machines, but there are new ones. I did do the 30-day Plank Challenge with a friend on Facebook and that kind of worked.

So this is my plan. I’m going to do a Barbara Tour of Exercise Alternatives. Just the idea of being in an overheated room full of sweating people leaves me screaming for an exit, but this is a Mission. A Quest. By saying this publicly, I’ve embarrassed myself into action (I hope). Either that or dementia will nip at my heels. Stay tuned.

Old, frightened, and far away

When your 90-year-old mother gets sick and feels afraid to sleep alone at night, none of her four far-flung offspring can sleep either. The last few days have had us telephoning, emailing, researching, investigating, and contacting. Worrying, pacing, talking, and fretting.

But not sleeping.

My sister, Elizabeth, the only one within driving distance, drove down to Long Island. While she tried to sleep in my mother’s living room, my mother repeatedly called out – about every minute or so – “Elizabeth, are you there?” Distraught, Elizabeth checked her time zones and figured it was safe to call me at 1 a.m. It was. I was busy worrying and researching.

My mother knows that something is very wrong with her cognitive abilities and memory. When she’s drifting off to sleep, the problem is worse: she’s not sure when or where she is. Are her parents still alive? Is she home? She gets so frightened, she can’t bear to be alone and has lately taken to wandering the halls, seeking out anyone for human contact.

During the day, she’s alert and active enough to participate in lots of activities. Her assisted living place is friendly, welcoming, and familiar. And there are things going on all the time. But at night, it’s another story.

So what are we to do? If she moved nearer to one of us, she’d lose the familiarity that is the anchor to her comfort right now. She knows where the dining room is, what she gets to do at 10, 11, and the movies at 2. She knows where her bingo chips are stashed and what to look for in her local newspaper. All these things are the bedrock of her functioning, and she doesn’t want to give them up.

But if she’s ill or tired, frightened or upset, we are all hundreds and thousands of miles away. All of us have reached the point where we check Caller I.D. and our hearts lurch if it’s her area code. We exist in a state of waiting for the other shoe to drop. And they seem to be dropping at a faster pace.

Oh, the world offers such promise in exploring wide open spaces, tackling new opportunities in new locations. My mother’s four kids split to the corners of the globe, but now the law of unintended consequences is playing out all over our age group as we deal with far-away, aging parents.

As I vibrate with the anxiety of “what should we do” and have trouble sleeping, Tim says, “That’s why we’re going to move to be nearer our kid.” So the relocation question for us – which had pretty much resolved in favor of the life we like here in Alaska – is now an open question again.

Eventually, I might be an old person. (I must admit, this whole business has me reflecting on just how old I might appreciate getting.) But just like I’m de-cluttering so our daughter won’t have to clear out my accumulated junk, I don’t want her to have these tortured moments of being far away from something that absorbs her emotional energy. So does that mean we move? Or at least get nearer?

Oh, that’ll have to wait. I can fret about decisions for only one old person at a time, and right now, that’s not me.

I am the Werd Nerd

I love words! I love their derivations, their histories, their roots, their etymology! And once a year, I love pronouncing them. That happens at the Alaska Literacy Program’s annual BizBee, the adult spelling bee. Rules are different for the grown-ups: spellers compete as teams of three, and they get to confer on the spelling. If they don’t like the word they’re given, they can pay to send that word to a rival team and get a new one. Obviously, this is a fund raiser and obviously, it’s a lot of fun. I used to pronounce for the Alaska State Spelling Bee – the “real” one with the kids – and it was fairly traumatic, with occasional tears. The adults don’t cry, but they also NEVER forget the words they’ve misspelled.

So every year, I make up a story about the night’s action with all the words and their definitions. As unbelievable as it seems, all the words come from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. And if you think they’re easy, just imagine spelling in front of an audience. Here goes!

You have to worry about a spelling bee when the first word is xylophone, but miraculously, no one went out in the first round. Nevertheless, the TelAlaska team worried about Permian and passed it on to the “Dewey Decimators” of the Anchorage Public Library (in their hard hats and safety vests from Loussac Library construction). Unfortunately, in the second round, Permian was enough to render the librarians extinct.

Round 3 marked the cold-blooded demise of the Literacy Program’s home team with herpetology. The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship just didn’t have the spine to get past notochord, and they fell out soon after.

Something very bizarre happened in Round 4. The man in the iron mask from Arctic Entries #2, “Ye Olde Autocorrekt Team,” stood up – like a crazy man – and shouted some medieval sort of thing to the audience … and went on to spell his word. The outbursts proved epidemic: the Mensa speller announced “menhaden, not to be confused with manhating,” and went on to catch the fish.

Round 5 saw lots of action. No matter how sprightly or playful the scherzo, it knocked the Jewel Lake Parish/Children’s World team out in triple time. ServiceMASTER sensed the drought and passed foggara to United Way, who managed to drown in the desert right after. This was really sad because their team, dubbed “Spell Me Up, Scotty,” came accompanied by cheerleaders who yelled things like, “Make it so, #1!”

The risk in passing a word lies in not knowing its replacement: alas, the doors were closed on ServiceMASTER by their new gatekeeper, durwan.

Three teams couldn’t pluck the strings of pizzicato so they passed it on to “Ye Olde Autocorrekt,” and it would prove their swan song in Round 6. In a four-word tragedy, the Providence “Health Literacy Heroes” passed three words in succession (pogrom, intaglio, and Holi ) only to fall off their skis on vorlage.

In Round 6, First National Bank’s fondness for things Greek went out in the face of philhellenism, but not before they sent zeitgeber on to TelAlaska. That cleaned the biological clocks of the “Telephonics,” but they surprised us all by pulling out their TeamSaver Award. For having sold the most raffle tickets, they held a secret Get-out-of-Jail free card and were back in the game.

Periodically, the Human Dictionary was called upon for a second opinion for those teams not trusting the New York origins of the pronouncer, and the three judges (the “Killer Bees”) – all former and current school board members – took the heat as the bearers of good (“That is correct.”) and bad news (“That is incorrect.”).

Arctic Entries #1 – after a miraculous string of successfully spelling words originating in Sanskrit – suffered redness, itching, and lesions as they went out in Round 8 on eczematous. Ooh, things got heated: the Sons of Norway – the 2013 champions – passed fanfaronade to Mensa, last year’s champions, and it proved fatal in Round 9. Mensa lost all boasting rights; fanfaronade knocked them out. But in the same round, all the reading in the world couldn’t save the Sons of Norway from omnilegent or TelAlaska, buried in soot with fuliginous. What happens when all teams are eliminated in one round? They all come back in.

But TelAlaska couldn’t dig themselves out after hypogeal so that left Mensa and the Sons of Norway. Poor Mensa – faced with the hardest word of the whole evening to pronounce – intussusception – just couldn’t put pieces back together. That left the Sons of Norway to face two words to win: they ate up porcini and didn’t die on the sword of katana. New champions for 2015!

Okay, maybe you have to be a Werd Nerd to find all this remotely interesting, but it sure is a lot of laughs. And think of the value of spelling for our Third Thirds: a way to keep our brains active and our cognitive abilities sharp. But it only works if the words are tough, obscure, and frustrating!