An Informative and Entertaining Alzheimer's Story

A few days ago at the Kappa house, one of the girls asked me to help her write an essay about Alzheimer's that was both informative and entertaining. Easily done. There are many things more entertaining than Alzheimer's.

She asked me when I could get together to work; we have to get together to do this? Can't I just ghostwrite it? But after I asked her what I was getting out of this, she backed off a little, like I was a homeless man. Many girls think the houseboys are homeless. Once, when I worked in the Pi Phi house, a girl found me in the kitchen and told me that there was a homeless man sleeping on the living room couch, and all the girls were afraid to wake him up. It turned out it was just Blake Chism. He wants to be an engineer.

So instead of actually working, I said that I would tell a story about Alzheimer's that was both informative and entertaining, and she could transcribe it. This is what I spoke:

My family lived with my grandmother for six years; we moved in when she was first diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She was nearly normal up until the last two years, when she began to slide. She forgot my name - I think she thought I was my grandfather. She told me I was handsome a lot (first sign of Alzheimer's). And she stopped watching television. Unfamiliar shows upset her. She could watch DVD's of the shows she traditionally watched. She loved Murder She Wrote, and she loved JAG. That's all that she watched every episode multiple times, and I watched with her.

Eventually she reached a point where she couldn't remember even these shows. Harmon Rabb, or Angela Landsbury would solve a crime, and she would ask, "Who is that?" That's the hero, Grandma. He or she is doing good.

But she retained something peculiar. Even though she forgot the premises and the characters, she could always identify the bad guys. I don't think she could remember the bad guys - that would be way to much to ask of her mind, and really, if she could do that, that's a waste of memory in a world where she thinks we're married. No, I think that she just watched enough mysteries that she cracked some sort of narrative code by which bad guys could be identified by physical traits and entrances. Every first time a bad guy would enter the screen, ten minutes into the episode where he's not even considered a suspect, Grandma would make her hands into guns and shout "Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew! Pew!"

That was her version of a machine gun.

Thanks a lot, Grandma. I hadn't seen this episode, but now it's pretty obvious that the uncle did it. This is why I never take you out with me.

Sometimes the Kappa house makes me feel like a sage. Yesterday, a girl at lunch told me she took a right brain/left brain test, and out of 18 questions, answered 18 of them with her left brain. What does that mean. It means, I said, that you'll die when you're 25. She didn't talk to me after that.

This morning, as I walked through the house after breakfast, I heard different girls talking about the right brain/left brain test. One said, "If you're all left brain, you're only supposed to live till 25."