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."

An Alternate Olympics

A little over a year ago, my grandmother died. I know, that's a terrible way to begin a story. I once read a short story where, in the first paragraph, the main characters accidentally kills an infant. I think that tops what I just did, so you should feel lucky.

She had Alzeheimer's, so her passing was positive - it was her time, so to speak. And it was actually a blessing, because we had a week's notice, and everyone who knew her was able to fly in and say goodbye. All the men my dad grew up with came to the house; it was where they all stayed when they were younger. They told many stories, and my favorite is this: there were five boys, all within a year of each other, that lived in her house. Every fall, each boy would invite four friends, and the 25 kids would be split into 5 teams of 5, and my grandfather would run an Olympics, with basketball games and sprinting events and a spades tournament. But the best event was hot wax tolerance. Each team would pick one kid, and the kid would hold out his arm, and hot wax would be poured on it. Whoever didn't wimp out won the gold.

I read a poem I wrote at the funeral. I wrote it when she was unconscious, and people were filing in and our of her room, whispering about hot wax tolerance.

look at me
i have four foot wings
as thin as my skin
and the color of my boys

rising up from my bed
i am floating to a place
where the stars are halfway
between silence and noise

look at me
i am an angel
i am done with changes
i am completely released

i have held on forever
but forever is over
this is me going
away with the east

look at me
yet not while you're crying
with your feet on the ground
and your minds set on mourning

i am a satellite drifting
but i am not drifting
i am not an old woman
on morphine

look at me
i have four foot wings
the skies are all mine
but where are my loved ones

i am a spirit
but they are still bodies
this is me saying
goodbye to my sons

How My Grandparents Met

One more pause on this past weekend, if you don't mind, which I'm sure you won't, because you don't exist, person who I believe reads my blog. So I can pause without cause and still receive no applause. (EDITORS NOTE: that rhyme doesn't make sense).

I spent this past weekend with a group of fifteen year olds at a fall camp retreat (NOTE THE PRESENCE OF THE DEEP V IN THE INSET). We were extremely bored. There are only so many games of Ultimate Frisbee a man can withstand before his index finger begins to bleed. Plus, whenever the sun goes down, there isn't much to do except for sappy stuff.

In a related story that is too long to tell today, I once invented an alternate persona named Dragon Master. I promise to one day explain it, but all I can say is that with this persona came several stories of dragon fighting honor and valour. Originally, I told these stories to put seven year olds to bed. As it turns out, it works just as well, possibly better, with high schoolers.

I told my guys the story about my grandfather, a magnificent Dragon Master in his own right, behind enemy lines in World War II taking out a nest of dragons trained by the Third Reich. Dropped into Nazi occupied France, his team was completely obliterated mid-air by flak fire (this is why the story might work better with older kids: I was able to describe in detail entrails falling through the night sky, coming out of dead floating paratroopers). With only a British sniper, Sergeant Gladstone, and a mysterious Frenchman with perfect skin who they conscripted as a guide, my grandfather found the nest and destroyed it. In the end, Sergeant Gladstone had to sacrifice his life for the success of the mission, but the Dragon Master and the Frenchman survived (who turned out to be a woman, who later became my grandmother).

I told this story in installments, culminating in a late night finale, with half of the group sleeping. When it came time for the killing blow to the primary antagonist, a dragon named Ephialtes, I had my grandfather blow off the dragon's leg by wedging a grenade between a knife and the skin of the dragon it was stuck in. After the leg was gone, the dragon was still alive, but it was laying on the explosive charges that were meant to seal the cave and trap the dragons. My grandfather raised the detonator, but when it came time to say his final words to the dragon, hopefully in pun form, I blanked. I said, "And he said," and then there was a thirty second pause, and then I said the only thing that came to mind, "Way to go." And then he blew up the dragon.