How I know I don't Have Alzheimer's disease
MARY SHERIDAN
I plunge my hands, cold this damp fall morning, into warm suds and pick up the last of what was once a set of thick clear water glasses tinged with blue. A memory comes to mind about a time the set was whole, when old friends sat at my kitchen table on a hot, humid afternoon, the glasses in their hands breaking a sweat against the iced drinks inside.
This memory launches me into a stream, a tributary of the River Lethe, that flows beneath my conscious awareness. When I return from my short journey, I’m holding the glass, adjusting the temperature of the rinse water and trying to recall the name of the woman who wrote the Harry Potter books. I know that I know her name, but it's misplaced in a back room where my mind carelessly tosses bits of general knowledge that end up intermingled with what I wore yesterday and what was in the casserole called Shipwreck that my mother used to make. Everything I ever abandoned in that room hangs out in the dark, some bits chatting with others, some bits napping, others getting up and leaving after they’ve decided they’ve been ignored for long enough.
At one time I had a highly efficient administrative assistant on my neural staff who could go into that back room, reach through the clutter, retrieve what I wanted and bring it to me. It now seems she has either gone on to a better job in someone else’s brain or, more likely, has retired, without notice, fed up with the lack of thanks she ever got from me.
She’s been replaced with a poorly trained intern, as lost in the back room of my brain as the name of the woman who wrote Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone. While I stand at my kitchen sink rinsing a bowl, the intern sends an image of the actress, Gena Rowlands, to my mind’s eye.
I know that Gena Rowlands didn’t write Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but I think you can see how a rookie intern searching in the dark might confuse one for the other. I used to go to the movies, a lot, and the image of Gena Rowlands looms larger than the author of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in my back room.
Today, at the sink, my mind wanders through scenes from movies I watched thirty or forty years ago, until the particular image of Gena Rowlands in my mind’s eye matches up with her character in the film Gloria, the last movie directed by Ms. Rowlands’ husband, John Cassavetes.
But images in the mind’s eye don’t hold still and so Gena Rowlands morphs into Anjelica Huston in The Grifters directed by—damn. I can’t remember who directed The Grifters.
Drying my hands, I walk to the kitchen table where old friends once sat holding glasses from a set that used to be intact and open my laptop to find the name I want. A hit of dopamine rewards my recognition of Stephen Frears as director of The Grifters. I look up a few more things and by the time I get back to the sink to tackle the grungy pot I’ve left soaking overnight, I’m wondering what it was about Stephen Frears I needed to know.
I plunge my hands, cold this damp fall morning, into warm suds and pick up the last of what was once a set of thick clear water glasses tinged with blue. A memory comes to mind about a time the set was whole, when old friends sat at my kitchen table on a hot, humid afternoon, the glasses in their hands breaking a sweat against the iced drinks inside.
This memory launches me into a stream, a tributary of the River Lethe, that flows beneath my conscious awareness. When I return from my short journey, I’m holding the glass, adjusting the temperature of the rinse water and trying to recall the name of the woman who wrote the Harry Potter books. I know that I know her name, but it's misplaced in a back room where my mind carelessly tosses bits of general knowledge that end up intermingled with what I wore yesterday and what was in the casserole called Shipwreck that my mother used to make. Everything I ever abandoned in that room hangs out in the dark, some bits chatting with others, some bits napping, others getting up and leaving after they’ve decided they’ve been ignored for long enough.
At one time I had a highly efficient administrative assistant on my neural staff who could go into that back room, reach through the clutter, retrieve what I wanted and bring it to me. It now seems she has either gone on to a better job in someone else’s brain or, more likely, has retired, without notice, fed up with the lack of thanks she ever got from me.
She’s been replaced with a poorly trained intern, as lost in the back room of my brain as the name of the woman who wrote Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone. While I stand at my kitchen sink rinsing a bowl, the intern sends an image of the actress, Gena Rowlands, to my mind’s eye.
I know that Gena Rowlands didn’t write Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but I think you can see how a rookie intern searching in the dark might confuse one for the other. I used to go to the movies, a lot, and the image of Gena Rowlands looms larger than the author of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in my back room.
Today, at the sink, my mind wanders through scenes from movies I watched thirty or forty years ago, until the particular image of Gena Rowlands in my mind’s eye matches up with her character in the film Gloria, the last movie directed by Ms. Rowlands’ husband, John Cassavetes.
But images in the mind’s eye don’t hold still and so Gena Rowlands morphs into Anjelica Huston in The Grifters directed by—damn. I can’t remember who directed The Grifters.
Drying my hands, I walk to the kitchen table where old friends once sat holding glasses from a set that used to be intact and open my laptop to find the name I want. A hit of dopamine rewards my recognition of Stephen Frears as director of The Grifters. I look up a few more things and by the time I get back to the sink to tackle the grungy pot I’ve left soaking overnight, I’m wondering what it was about Stephen Frears I needed to know.
ii.
Like many people of a certain age, I fear that the self-eroding process of Alzheimer’s disease has begun inside me whenever my memory fails. Memory loss is usually the first symptom reported by people, or those nearest to them, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia.
My fear passes when I think about people with Alzheimer’s whose cognitive function I was called upon to assess during my tenure as a psychotherapist working with families of adults with neurological impairments. I’m familiar with the symptoms, and my symptoms don’t look like theirs. I can still make and follow a plan, balance a checkbook as well as I ever could, and always ace the mini mental status exam that is now a standard feature of my annual doctor’s visit.
Still, there is that one thing that lurks behind my shoulder, breathing down on me. As the disease progresses, people with Alzheimer’s forget that they can’t remember, are unaware when brain functions responsible for making new memories fail, when whole sections of grey matter atrophy.
The fear that passed is back, whispering in my ear: “If you were in that twilight zone, would you know?”
I recall a saying, held like a talisman, among those who work around people with Alzheimer’s disease: If you remember that you forgot, that’s ok; if you forget that you forgot, that’s not.
And so I’m comforted to know that when I walk into a room and immediately forget what I went in for, I can return to the spot where I had the thought that subsequently disappeared, and wait for it to circle back to me, like an airport shuttle that comes around the terminal one more time to collect anyone who didn’t make it on the first pass.
Most often, the diagnosis for people like me who don’t have the classic symptoms of Alzheimer’s is the more common and less annihilating CRS. The polite way of describing this condition is “Can’t Remember Stuff.”
The slowing down of recall that those of us with the non-medical, self-diagnosis of CRS experience differs from the inability to create new memories that affects people with Alzheimer’s disease.
A common symptom of CRS is no longer finding the name of the woman who wrote Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire on the tip of your tongue; summoning a memory takes longer than it used to. I've taken to saying “it will come to me,” when I realize that a recollection is not going to show up as quickly as I want.
The something I would like to recall has likely moved to the cluttered room at the back of my brain where older and slower neural staff, or their untrained replacements, find only a semblance of what I want. Sometimes, the search party succeeds in finding exactly the right thing, but it can take hours, or even days before they awaken me at three a.m. to let me know, for example, who wrote Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
My fear passes when I think about people with Alzheimer’s whose cognitive function I was called upon to assess during my tenure as a psychotherapist working with families of adults with neurological impairments. I’m familiar with the symptoms, and my symptoms don’t look like theirs. I can still make and follow a plan, balance a checkbook as well as I ever could, and always ace the mini mental status exam that is now a standard feature of my annual doctor’s visit.
Still, there is that one thing that lurks behind my shoulder, breathing down on me. As the disease progresses, people with Alzheimer’s forget that they can’t remember, are unaware when brain functions responsible for making new memories fail, when whole sections of grey matter atrophy.
The fear that passed is back, whispering in my ear: “If you were in that twilight zone, would you know?”
I recall a saying, held like a talisman, among those who work around people with Alzheimer’s disease: If you remember that you forgot, that’s ok; if you forget that you forgot, that’s not.
And so I’m comforted to know that when I walk into a room and immediately forget what I went in for, I can return to the spot where I had the thought that subsequently disappeared, and wait for it to circle back to me, like an airport shuttle that comes around the terminal one more time to collect anyone who didn’t make it on the first pass.
Most often, the diagnosis for people like me who don’t have the classic symptoms of Alzheimer’s is the more common and less annihilating CRS. The polite way of describing this condition is “Can’t Remember Stuff.”
The slowing down of recall that those of us with the non-medical, self-diagnosis of CRS experience differs from the inability to create new memories that affects people with Alzheimer’s disease.
A common symptom of CRS is no longer finding the name of the woman who wrote Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire on the tip of your tongue; summoning a memory takes longer than it used to. I've taken to saying “it will come to me,” when I realize that a recollection is not going to show up as quickly as I want.
The something I would like to recall has likely moved to the cluttered room at the back of my brain where older and slower neural staff, or their untrained replacements, find only a semblance of what I want. Sometimes, the search party succeeds in finding exactly the right thing, but it can take hours, or even days before they awaken me at three a.m. to let me know, for example, who wrote Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
iii.
Communication between people with CRS can look odd to anyone on the outside looking in. One evening my friend Laurel and I were trying to decide on a movie to watch. Nick Nolte’s name came up.
“What’s that movie he was in with Barbra Streisand?” Laurel asked.
“Hmm, I don’t think I saw it.”
“You know it, though. I’m sure you read the book. The author’s name begins with a ‘P’ or maybe a ‘C’,” she said.
The thread Laurel threw into the labyrinth of our conversation attached itself to the web of associations that is my memory and revealed that I did know who Laurel was talking about, and that the author was male. I still couldn’t bring his name to mind.
“I’m pretty sure it begins with ‘C’,” I said.
“Maybe Connelly,” Laurel replied.
I thought about the retrieval process and pictured a salmon swimming upstream, trying to get back to the spawning memory.
“So,” I said to Laurel, “why don’t we watch Salmon Fishing in the Yemen tonight?”
A couple days later I ran into Laurel at the Farmer’s Market.
“Pat Conroy,” I said.
“That’s it!” she replied. “But what was the name of the book?”
“Hasn’t come to me yet.”
Laurel phoned a few days after that.
“Hi,” I said.
“Prince of Tides,” she responded.
The conversation had taken just under a week to complete.
“What’s that movie he was in with Barbra Streisand?” Laurel asked.
“Hmm, I don’t think I saw it.”
“You know it, though. I’m sure you read the book. The author’s name begins with a ‘P’ or maybe a ‘C’,” she said.
The thread Laurel threw into the labyrinth of our conversation attached itself to the web of associations that is my memory and revealed that I did know who Laurel was talking about, and that the author was male. I still couldn’t bring his name to mind.
“I’m pretty sure it begins with ‘C’,” I said.
“Maybe Connelly,” Laurel replied.
I thought about the retrieval process and pictured a salmon swimming upstream, trying to get back to the spawning memory.
“So,” I said to Laurel, “why don’t we watch Salmon Fishing in the Yemen tonight?”
A couple days later I ran into Laurel at the Farmer’s Market.
“Pat Conroy,” I said.
“That’s it!” she replied. “But what was the name of the book?”
“Hasn’t come to me yet.”
Laurel phoned a few days after that.
“Hi,” I said.
“Prince of Tides,” she responded.
The conversation had taken just under a week to complete.
iv.
The term for what ails those of us with CRS is retrieval failure, a phrase that makes me feel like a bad dog, a Labrador who won’t play ball. Laurel and I could have looked up what we were trying to remember on the internet, but it was more important to play ball with our memories, to exercise our ability to retrieve.
The more often we retrieve a memory, the more robust the processes of retrieval grow.
But retrieving a memory requires that it was first successfully stored. Encoding is the process that results in memory storage; neurons release cascades of electrical charges, prompting chemical messengers to leap across gaps between synapses the way Superman leaps across tall buildings. The more often a particular leap is re-experienced, in action or imagination, the stronger the pattern of synaptic connections grow, and the more available that pattern is to future retrieval. Paying attention to a memory in the making increases the likelihood of recalling it later. But attention is squirrelly.
Like the talking dog in the movie Up who can’t help interrupting whatever he’s doing whenever he sees a — “SQUIRREL!” — our own minds jump around, interrupting our perceptions and reflections until one morning we’re standing at the kitchen sink wondering why we need to remember who wrote Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince.
Information that doesn’t encode evaporates like images on an Etch A Sketch, when the box is shaken. People with Alzheimer’s remember things that happened decades ago because those memories are stored in patterns that run deeper in the brain than newer ones now being drawn on the screen. The most recent markings are the first to be destroyed when Alzheimer’s begins its assault. Fresh information can’t be encoded because memories in the making are Etch A Sketched away.
Memory is squirrelly in another way, too. Remembering is partly an act of imagination, a re-creating of experience. Each time we recall a memory, we overlay it with elements of what’s happening, internally or externally, at the time of recollection. Each reminiscence adds something to the last, and the most recent layer is more about creative imagination than it is about so-called objective reality.
Friends and I have lively discussions about times when the way we remember something can’t possibly be the way that it happened.
I traveled a lot in the 1970s and remember details of a meandering route that took me, over the course of half a year, from New York City to a kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee. The journey is clear in my mind’s eye but the arc of travel I hold as solid memory won’t show me how I got to Istanbul.
I can hear the call to prayers from minarets scattered throughout the city and see men walking down the street holding chains attached around the necks of black bears they are pulling behind them. I remember standing on the bridge across the Bosphorus Strait, one foot in Europe and one in Asia, as pedestrians could do in those days. I taste sweet black tea served in clear glasses in golden metal holders, and smell oranges ripening in winter sun that illuminates the dome of the Blue Mosque. I know I was there, but the only thing my memory will cough up when I ask myself how I got there is an old song that tells me "Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople,” an ear worm that’s incubated inside me since the 1950s.
Consequently, I’ve made up a route that could have taken me to Istanbul-not-Constantinople. I took a bus from the coastal Turkish town of Marmaris, I tell myself, and along the way was abducted by aliens who erased that part of the journey from my memory.
What’s more likely than aliens is that my memory banks didn’t register anything on the way to Istanbul-not-Constantinople that stood out more than all the other sights, sounds and sensations of traveling for months on end in foreign lands. Nothing remarkable enough on that segment of the trip impressed itself on any of the neural neighborhoods involved in memory production and recall.
The more we experience the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations of a scene, the more opportunities we have for a memory in the making to leave breadcrumbs along multiple neural pathways. The resulting cluster of tracks littered with memory cues can later help us find our way back to the experience. Whatever reverberates emotionally is stored at a deeper level than that which is more prosaic. The more and deeper the routes involved in constructing a memory, the more traces we have for later recall.
A conversation, recurring in its pattern rather than in its content, that I have with my friend Anthony, who moved back to town 25 years after I’d last seen him, goes something like this:
Me: “Ugh. That reminds me of a horrible movie we saw, something like the thief’s cook and her lover’s wife.
Anthony: “Oh yeah, I remember. It was The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. I saw it in ’89 in LA. My friends thought it had more socially redeeming value than I did.”
“You saw that movie with me, right after I moved to the Eastside. It made me so sick to my stomach that I spent the ride back to my house trying not to retch in your car. When we got to Mason Street, you started humming Basin Street Blues.”
“Well, I definitely remember talking with Mike and Phil about that movie, at their house in LA.”
Anthony remembered the discussion he had with his friends more vividly than he remembered other details about seeing the movie, likely because their conversation about it held the most meaning for him. As a result, their exchange of ideas would have come back to his mind more often than other elements related to watching the film, and was thus positioned to be what emerged from his long-term memory when we talked.
My memory about where he saw the movie is likely more accurate than his — and I do realize how this sounds—because my recall included not only visual and verbal components of the event, but also an intense emotional response and strong visceral sensations with their own pathways to the memory. Basin Street Blues went to a neural neighborhood that loves music and laid down its own track to recall the memory.
A lot of associated elements came together during our conversation to reconstruct a jigsaw puzzle of the event, my version likely containing fewer missing pieces than his.
The more often we retrieve a memory, the more robust the processes of retrieval grow.
But retrieving a memory requires that it was first successfully stored. Encoding is the process that results in memory storage; neurons release cascades of electrical charges, prompting chemical messengers to leap across gaps between synapses the way Superman leaps across tall buildings. The more often a particular leap is re-experienced, in action or imagination, the stronger the pattern of synaptic connections grow, and the more available that pattern is to future retrieval. Paying attention to a memory in the making increases the likelihood of recalling it later. But attention is squirrelly.
Like the talking dog in the movie Up who can’t help interrupting whatever he’s doing whenever he sees a — “SQUIRREL!” — our own minds jump around, interrupting our perceptions and reflections until one morning we’re standing at the kitchen sink wondering why we need to remember who wrote Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince.
Information that doesn’t encode evaporates like images on an Etch A Sketch, when the box is shaken. People with Alzheimer’s remember things that happened decades ago because those memories are stored in patterns that run deeper in the brain than newer ones now being drawn on the screen. The most recent markings are the first to be destroyed when Alzheimer’s begins its assault. Fresh information can’t be encoded because memories in the making are Etch A Sketched away.
Memory is squirrelly in another way, too. Remembering is partly an act of imagination, a re-creating of experience. Each time we recall a memory, we overlay it with elements of what’s happening, internally or externally, at the time of recollection. Each reminiscence adds something to the last, and the most recent layer is more about creative imagination than it is about so-called objective reality.
Friends and I have lively discussions about times when the way we remember something can’t possibly be the way that it happened.
I traveled a lot in the 1970s and remember details of a meandering route that took me, over the course of half a year, from New York City to a kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee. The journey is clear in my mind’s eye but the arc of travel I hold as solid memory won’t show me how I got to Istanbul.
I can hear the call to prayers from minarets scattered throughout the city and see men walking down the street holding chains attached around the necks of black bears they are pulling behind them. I remember standing on the bridge across the Bosphorus Strait, one foot in Europe and one in Asia, as pedestrians could do in those days. I taste sweet black tea served in clear glasses in golden metal holders, and smell oranges ripening in winter sun that illuminates the dome of the Blue Mosque. I know I was there, but the only thing my memory will cough up when I ask myself how I got there is an old song that tells me "Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople,” an ear worm that’s incubated inside me since the 1950s.
Consequently, I’ve made up a route that could have taken me to Istanbul-not-Constantinople. I took a bus from the coastal Turkish town of Marmaris, I tell myself, and along the way was abducted by aliens who erased that part of the journey from my memory.
What’s more likely than aliens is that my memory banks didn’t register anything on the way to Istanbul-not-Constantinople that stood out more than all the other sights, sounds and sensations of traveling for months on end in foreign lands. Nothing remarkable enough on that segment of the trip impressed itself on any of the neural neighborhoods involved in memory production and recall.
The more we experience the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations of a scene, the more opportunities we have for a memory in the making to leave breadcrumbs along multiple neural pathways. The resulting cluster of tracks littered with memory cues can later help us find our way back to the experience. Whatever reverberates emotionally is stored at a deeper level than that which is more prosaic. The more and deeper the routes involved in constructing a memory, the more traces we have for later recall.
A conversation, recurring in its pattern rather than in its content, that I have with my friend Anthony, who moved back to town 25 years after I’d last seen him, goes something like this:
Me: “Ugh. That reminds me of a horrible movie we saw, something like the thief’s cook and her lover’s wife.
Anthony: “Oh yeah, I remember. It was The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. I saw it in ’89 in LA. My friends thought it had more socially redeeming value than I did.”
“You saw that movie with me, right after I moved to the Eastside. It made me so sick to my stomach that I spent the ride back to my house trying not to retch in your car. When we got to Mason Street, you started humming Basin Street Blues.”
“Well, I definitely remember talking with Mike and Phil about that movie, at their house in LA.”
Anthony remembered the discussion he had with his friends more vividly than he remembered other details about seeing the movie, likely because their conversation about it held the most meaning for him. As a result, their exchange of ideas would have come back to his mind more often than other elements related to watching the film, and was thus positioned to be what emerged from his long-term memory when we talked.
My memory about where he saw the movie is likely more accurate than his — and I do realize how this sounds—because my recall included not only visual and verbal components of the event, but also an intense emotional response and strong visceral sensations with their own pathways to the memory. Basin Street Blues went to a neural neighborhood that loves music and laid down its own track to recall the memory.
A lot of associated elements came together during our conversation to reconstruct a jigsaw puzzle of the event, my version likely containing fewer missing pieces than his.
v.
More and more memories are lost to the processes of recall as Alzheimer’s disease progresses. At a certain point, the act of remembering might become almost all creative imagination. A person with Alzheimer’s may fill in memory gaps with images from long ago, or fantasies that feel good, all of it called confabulation.
At the request of Lillian, a woman in her eighties, I visited the home she shared with her husband, Patrick, to assess his mental status. Even though he’d never met me before, Patrick welcomed me like an old friend. I asked him what he’d done so far that day.
“Ooooh,” he said in a cadence that revealed he was originally from Ireland, “I went up the hill to milk cows for the nuns and they gave me all the cream I wanted, right off the top.”
I searched my mind for nuns on a hill in our town and could only come up with The Poor Clares who lived a cloistered life in a house without cows on a residential street leading up to the Santa Barbara Mission. The Mission has a creche scene with live animals every Christmas, but I’d never seen any cows there.
It seemed likely that Patrick had helped nuns with cows when he was a young man in Ireland and that he was calling on his earliest memories, the ones with patterns deep enough to still send some images from his personal history up through the rubble left by the destruction of more recent memories.
“And after you milked the cows?” I asked.
“I ate the breakfast my wife made for me—twenty-five rashers of bacon with thirty-three eggs sitting on top, all smiling up at me. I was so grateful that I gave her a sponge bath and held her up over my head to dry in the sun,” he said, love shining through his eyes.
If I ever have to travel the road to dementia-town, I want to take whatever streetcar Patrick rode to get there.
At the request of Lillian, a woman in her eighties, I visited the home she shared with her husband, Patrick, to assess his mental status. Even though he’d never met me before, Patrick welcomed me like an old friend. I asked him what he’d done so far that day.
“Ooooh,” he said in a cadence that revealed he was originally from Ireland, “I went up the hill to milk cows for the nuns and they gave me all the cream I wanted, right off the top.”
I searched my mind for nuns on a hill in our town and could only come up with The Poor Clares who lived a cloistered life in a house without cows on a residential street leading up to the Santa Barbara Mission. The Mission has a creche scene with live animals every Christmas, but I’d never seen any cows there.
It seemed likely that Patrick had helped nuns with cows when he was a young man in Ireland and that he was calling on his earliest memories, the ones with patterns deep enough to still send some images from his personal history up through the rubble left by the destruction of more recent memories.
“And after you milked the cows?” I asked.
“I ate the breakfast my wife made for me—twenty-five rashers of bacon with thirty-three eggs sitting on top, all smiling up at me. I was so grateful that I gave her a sponge bath and held her up over my head to dry in the sun,” he said, love shining through his eyes.
If I ever have to travel the road to dementia-town, I want to take whatever streetcar Patrick rode to get there.
vi.
Whenever I fail to locate a memory I am seeking, I wish that the back room of my brain were more like the ideal library of my imagination, where reference books, recordings, maps and such are stored in order on shelves that go up to the ceiling. Sturdy rolling wooden ladders reach the highest stacks and elevators descend to temperature-controlled rooms where items from rarely accessed collections are methodically stored and easily retrieved. Card catalogues in deep, narrow drawers, their wood grains burnished and darkened by time and sticky hands, roll out forever, until you find what you are looking for.
The media room in this ideal library holds cinéma vérité film clips and audio recordings from the field where I can access objective, documentary-like replays of what actually happened, what was really said. Reference librarians stand by to inform me that Byzantium is an even older name for Istanbul-not-Constantinople, or casually mention the name of the woman who wrote Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
No more sending neural staff on scavenger hunts through cluttered back rooms, reached by a byzantine complex of dark alleyways, in search of pieces needed to create an assemblage resembling the original experience.
In the library of my dreams, the Dewey Decimal system rules. Instead, I wander cobblestone passageways littered with red herrings until she-who-cannot-be-named finally announces her arrival on the tip of my tongue.
The media room in this ideal library holds cinéma vérité film clips and audio recordings from the field where I can access objective, documentary-like replays of what actually happened, what was really said. Reference librarians stand by to inform me that Byzantium is an even older name for Istanbul-not-Constantinople, or casually mention the name of the woman who wrote Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
No more sending neural staff on scavenger hunts through cluttered back rooms, reached by a byzantine complex of dark alleyways, in search of pieces needed to create an assemblage resembling the original experience.
In the library of my dreams, the Dewey Decimal system rules. Instead, I wander cobblestone passageways littered with red herrings until she-who-cannot-be-named finally announces her arrival on the tip of my tongue.
To kaleidoscope is to reflect back a fractal with more symmetry than the angle first glimpsed contained.
/// Mary Sheridan is a retired psychotherapist, former video/filmmaker and erstwhile traveler. She used to write a regular column in an award-winning subsidiary of The New York Times. She was most recently published in the Anthology "Identity & Truth" (Square Wheel Press). Mary directs a non-profit organization serving families of adults with neurological impairments. She lives on California’s Central Coast. |