Joy of Matrimony, Part 683

Me (calling into the living room from my office while reading the Star online): Honey, [80s Indianapolis mullet-rocker] Henry Lee Summer was arrested for DUI in a Southside trailer park after he careened through the park, bouncing off cars, trucks, and at least one home, elbowed a Sheriff's deputy in the head, and was Tasered. And here I...

Poor Wife: Thought he couldn't even get arrested in Indianapolis any more?

Me: That is so not what I was about to say.

Birmingham, September 15, 1963

"That Sunday was the annual Youth Day at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Mamie H. Grier, superintendent of the Sunday school, stopped in at the basement ladies' room to find four young girls who had left Bible classes early and were talking excitedly about the beginning of the school year. All four were dressed in white from head to toe, as this was their day to run the main service for the adults at eleven o'clock. Grier urged them to hurry along and then went upstairs to sit in on her own women's Sunday-school class. They were engaged in a lively debate on the lesson topic, "The Love That Forgives," when a loud earthquake shook the entire church and showered the classroom with plaster and debris....

"Claude Wesley, principal of Lewis Elementary School, did not often subject himself to Sunday-school classes. He had dropped his adopted daughter Cynthia at the church and then escaped to the errands of a pleasant Sunday morning. When the noise of the blast interrupted his shoeshine, he had made his way to the church, the hospital, and finally the morgue, where he and his wife identified their daughter's remains by the feet and a ring on her finger...."

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters


"As Virgil Ware, 13, soared down a lonely stretch of road outside Birmingham, Ala., perched on the handlebars of his brother's bicycle, he was happily unaware of the carnage downtown. It was Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963. At 10:22 that morning, four black girls had been killed by a dynamite bomb set by the Ku Klux Klan at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The church was a focal point of Birmingham's civil rights turmoil that year, but that unrest hadn't touched Virgil and his coal-mining family, who lived in a modest, all-black suburb and rarely even saw white people. All Virgil had on his mind that day was the money he and his brothers were going to make with the newspaper route they had just secured....

"Succumbing to peer pressure, [Larry Joe] Sims had gone along with friends to a segregationist rally that day--and now he was holding a revolver that his classmate, Michael Lee Farley, 16, had handed him as they rode home on Farley's red motorbike, its small Confederate flag whipping in the wind. As they passed Virgil and his brother James, 16, Farley told Sims to fire the gun and "scare 'em." Sims closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. Two bullets hit Virgil in the chest and cheek, hurling him into a ditch as the motorbike sped on. "I've been shot," Virgil said. "No you ain't," [his brother] James said in disbelief. "Just stop tremblin', and you'll be O.K."

"He wasn't. Instead, Virgil Ware became the sixth and final black person to be killed in Birmingham that Sunday. (Another youth had been shot in the back by police after he threw rocks to protest the church bombing.) Virgil was the last civil rights casualty of the summer of '63--when the defining social movement of 20th century America became a national concern and not just a Southern one. Network television brought the season's atrocities into U.S. living rooms along with the triumphs, such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington 2 1/2 weeks earlier....

"Farley and Sims were charged with first-degree murder, but an all-white jury convicted Sims on a lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter (to which Farley then pleaded guilty). A white judge, Wallace Gibson, suspended the boys' sentences and gave them two years' probation--scolding them for their "lapse"--which made Lorene Ware "break down in the courtroom crying and hollering," recalls Melvin. Says James: "You could get more time back then for killing a good hunting dog."

Tim Padgett and Frank Sikora, "The Legacy of Virgil Ware", Time,
September 22, 2003

"If you're going to blame anyone for getting those children killed in Birmingham, it's your Supreme Court."

Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham Public Safety Director

Big Deal. There've Been Four Star Trek Spinoffs, And That's Just Since 1968.

George W. "Third Awakening" Bush, the only soap-opera star who takes those "Don't trust Melissa. She's just using you to get to Brad." fan letters seriously:

Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln's strongest supporters were religious people "who saw life in terms of good and evil" and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.

Yeah. Not to mention everything else.

If there's any similarity between the First Two Great Awakenings and general religious fervor today it would be the rather blasé attitude about theological consistency. Otherwise, one question:

Where is it?

Not in church attendance. You don't have to take Barna's word for that, just drive around next Sunday morning and try to get yourself into a traffic jam. It's not in personal accountability. The public face of religion in America has for thirty years now been about pointing fingers at others' shortcomings and ACLU-led compulsory atheism, and the big box churches now on every street corner are well-known for their over-egged ear pudding messages. It's not in a new inclusiveness, of the sort which reached out to blacks and poor whites in the 18th century, and it's certainly not in the confrontation of anti-Christian treatment of minorities, however much the religious right enjoys portraying itself as modern-day Abolitionists. Christians are still portraying themselves as 1st century lion bait, for that matter, with as little justification.

It's a bit curious, from Bush's stated perspective, that revivalism hasn't done much to boost his poll numbers. On the other hand, it's no real surprise he reports receiving so many letters from Americans of strong religious belief. Why, the very act of writing a letter to George Bush could test the limits of one's faith.

Ask a Chickenhawk

William Kristol and Rich Lowry, "Reinforce Baghdad", Washington Post September 12

As you may have heard, Kristol and Lowry (who should consider writing anagrammically as "Two Rosy Krill") have solved the little problem we're having with that war they've been (mostly) telling us we've been winning all along: more troops. More troops! How do they come up with 'em?

We are at a crucial moment in Iraq. Supporters of the war, like us, have in the past differed over tactics. But at this urgent pass, there can be no doubt that we need to stop the downward slide in Iraq by securing Baghdad.

Guys, look. There isn't any reason either of you should be taken seriously, but if we're going to pretend you are then you at least need to pretend to be acknowledging a truth neither of you was willing to acknowledge before it smacked you in the face, repeatedly. Your batting averages on Iraq are not just below the Mendoza Line; they're a challenge to the very concept of Zero. That much should be taken as apparent to anyone who might find himself reading the Post op-ed page. Instead we get this dance about "differing over tactics" in the past. Pure flummery. You been wrong about the war in the past, albeit in slightly different ways simply because Mr. Kristol chose to "differ" with the administration by insisting it should be doing more of what it already was doing. That's permitted him to pose as a "critic" of the administration's handling of the war, but the fact is that as spectacularly wrong as Lowry's "We're Winning" cover story was, and is, Kristol was wrongerer. Not to mention his cheerleadership for the On To Damascus contingent.

But then the game here isn't accuracy, and it's certainly not The Comeuppance of the Neocons, it's the "Conservative editors call for more troops" meta-story, which requires that Kristol and Lowry be accorded the standing to make such a critique. Only problem is, they don't have it.

It's a common theme around here, but however effective bald-faced lying has become in winning elections it still exacts a price. It's the Right, the "conservatives" in this country who are the self-styled guardians of the ancient virtues, but they're also the ones who've twisted the truth beyond all recognition. You listen to Bush's stump speech stirring tribute to 9/11 the other day, if you can, and it strikes you that he's still tap dancing around the very notion of who or what we're supposedly at war with. But there's no difficulty about it. There's no real confusion over whether you can conduct a real war against an idea. The only difficulty is that the war mongers cannot justify in principle what they want to do in fact, which is to take revenge on whomever is easiest and at hand, and use that as a permanent justification for the installation of a government that does their domestic dirty work in an atmosphere where debate is treason. And it doesn't work, and it's not going to work just because they get even more desperate to manage it.

So how, exactly, does this sort of thing wind up on the pages of WaPo? The Iraq war, the idea behind the Iraq war, every justification behind the Iraq war, the execution of the Iraq war, and the positive geopolitical results which were supposed to accrue to us because of the Iraq war are all piles of ash. Is the person who now wonders "Hmmm, what do you supposed Rich Lowry and Bill Kristol make of this" even sane? I know the WaPo is the ultimate Beltway insider, but aren't the editors human, too, at some point?

And that doesn't even touch the substance of their argument, which may be for the best since it's not a good idea to plunge your hands into a pile of crap unless you make a surgeon's salary, or at least a plumber's. "More troops to Baghdad," they say, without being called upon to tell us "From where?" It's been three years since the fall of 2003, when it should have become clear even to those too willfully blind to see it before that we did not have enough troops in Iraq. Three years. In three years we went from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima, and were preparing to make the costly excursion into the Philippines on principle, not military necessity. We were about to absorb the last shock offensive of the German army in the West. In three years the Soviets went from shovel brigades blockading the streets of Moscow, to pushing what was left of the German Army into the Baltic and Black Seas. Three years and untold lives sacrificed for half-assed ideas these two supported, and now they're ready to begin looking at the results?

Three years, and I'm sick of pointing out that the warfloggers have been moving the same Vapor Divisions around the same little Risk™ mapboards without ever once being asked where the feet to fill the boots are supposed to come from. If we put 400,000 more troops into Iraq, however you find them--whether conscripts we have no way of training at the rate necessary to get them into the field in 18 months, by stripping our military presence everywhere else in the world, or arming mechanics, computer operators, and the gang at the Corner--what are we supposed to do then if Kim Jong Il decides to cross over into South Korea, just to use one obvious example? Or is your answer "send 400,000 more troops?"

The bottom line is this: More U.S. troops in Iraq would improve our chances of winning a decisive battle at a decisive moment.

Decisive battle, the man says. Decisive battle. The Japanese used to talk like that in WWII. Lure the US Navy into the decisive battle. Some of 'em were still talking that way as we took Okinawa. And the Victory Disease of the modern American right doesn't even have the benefit of military competence. It's a gummable mash of victory in WWII, out-tchotkie-ing the Soviet Union, an abiding belief in the ability of technology to subdue whatever chaos they've gotten us into, and an unshakable convinction that the election of Ronald Reagan solved everything.

Well, that and the conviction that when all else fails you can blame the Liberal Media, traitors in Congress, and the public schools. One nice thing about Japanese Victory Disease was that most of its proponents ended up at the bottom of the Pacific.

Dude, What Are You Smokin'?

Feds: Illicit drug use up for boomers, down for teens
Associated Press
September 8, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The government reported Thursday that 4.4 percent of baby boomers ages 50 to 59 indicated they had used illicit drugs in the past month. It marks the third consecutive yearly increase recorded for that age group by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

All Right! My People!

Okay, you've probably already guessed, but I don't believe there even is such a thing as the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Who'd answer it? Does it come with use immunity? Or samples? My guess is that the major research involves scouring old Dragnet scripts for drug lingo, and they have an intern make sure the fake numbers add up to 100%. But if there really is one then one thing is certain: there's a hell of a lot more than 4.4% of boomers smoking dope.

Not that I have any idea, really; I just know that if the government is actually doing a survey they're underreporting the numbers, because the government, for some reason, is really concerned about this shit, likely for the same reason that people who hate sex rarely stop thinking about it.

So I don't give a shit, either way, until I come to this:

Meanwhile, illicit drug use among young teens went down from 11.6 percent in 2002 to 9.9 percent in 2005.
"Rarely have we seen a story like this where this is such an obvious contrast as one generation goes off stage right, and entering stage left is a generation that learned a lesson somehow and they're doing something very different," said David Murray, special assistant to the director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

David Murray, in case you've forgotten, was last sighted in 2003, when he warned Canada not to legalize pot. Back when the Bush administration was just itchin' to find more countries to democratize.

Okay, so, in fairness, I'm one of the few people in this country who will admit to believing that illicit drug use should be mandatory, just as soon as we figure out what to call them besides "illicit". My argument is fairly simple: I don't believe things can really get much more fucked up, and as such I think having a good time and installing interesting lighting is a reachable standard and one worth pursuing as national policy. Just consider how much better Congress would be if every time Sam Brownback rose to speak two people jumped up on either side and shotgunned him.

Right, that isn't gonna happen even if the Democrats do retake both houses, but in the interim could we just agree to put a cork in Mr. Murray? Just what is the malfunction, man? If the youth of America have found a different "kick" than their elders it looks to be lying to them on surveys then enjoying the resultant credulous media coverage of The Newer New Sobriety or Rainbow Parties. If you're reduced to finding silver linings in the things reported by children aged 12-17 to the most authoritarian adults we can dredge up, and if said linings require that you believe those things have some resemblance to the truth, I suggest a trip to the beach. And then keep going.

Is it really necessary to keep taking shots at boomers, now that most of us are barely ambulatory? Can you even find "Freebird" on the radio anymore? That train left the station twenty-five years ago, Mr. Murray. I know you guys would like to talk about anything but your record, but still; we've been playin' your game since Nixon and people still like to get high. And while I've got no real problem if 12-17 year olds smoke a little weed--it's better for 'em than the licit drugs they can get quite easily--I'd be happy to join in a campaign to discourage it, and discourage them from having sex, both for the same reason: aesthetics. They just don't do it very well. Besides, what I say has about as much effect as...what you have to say.

Happy Birthday

Jean-Louis Barrault
September 9, 1910--January 22, 1994

Happy Birthday

Virginia Patterson Hensley
September 8, 1932--March 5, 1963

Is America Ready for Self-Governance?

ITEM: Hard-hitting. Factual. Oooh, look, video!

Last evening my local teevee news led off with a delicious CBS pot-au-feu of the Al Jazeera bin Laden tape, the audiotape of the supposed new leader of the supposed al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the supposed President of the United States saying something or other about Terrism, in that order but edited as a single story.

We could, of course, make that confluence our story--60% of Americans may well still believe that Saddam Hussein planned 9/11, but you'd imagine, or maybe hope is the word, that the informed clotheshorses who report the news would know better--or we might note how nice it is to see bin Laden mentioned in the news once again, and, along with Iraq, become the lead story instead of a footnote, and mention what a coincidence it is that there's an election coming up sometime this fall.

Instead, what struck me was how this was reported as urgent news. "Shocking new video of bin Laden!" was the teaser, like Incredible new footage of the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping ladder, coming up at Six! The suicide videos also rated a mention, despite the fact that they were first seen long ago and were merely part of the package Al Jazeera broadcast. We then moved on to the headshot of the new al-Q in Iraq honcho (it's thoughtful of our evil terrorist mastermind enemies to get updated publicity stills as they climb the corporate ladder), who is heard ululating in the background as the translation of his speech runs next to the pic. But didn't al-Qaeda in Iraq already have a new leader?

Then came the segue to Bush, introduced with, "And while all this was going on..." All this? All what? All the editing involved in putting the story together? A five-year-old video and a tape of unknown if not dubious origin? That's "All This"? Sheesh, I'm thinking a lot of people in Baghdad were wishing those were the major stories of their day.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan is turning into Iraq, but rates no coverage at all. Time for a new PR firm.

ITEM: The Big Weekend Wrap-Up of the Fourth Anniversary of the Two-Week Lead-In to the Anniversary of 9/11

Desperate Republicans! The Amazing Performing Lapdog Teevee Network! Congress Acting Like It Does Things!

Okay, we spent some time, and by "we" I mean the few honest and rational observers left with a public forum not involving the Internets, asking how it was we came to lose the massive international good will after 9/11. So how is it that no one asks how we squandered the domestic good will? It's gone from being a solemn day of national remembrance to something like Circus of the Stars V: This Time We Starved the Big Cats First. There are a lot of things I don't understand, but right up there is the way modern "conservatives" seem unable to separate genuine values and cheap money-making opportunities, even when it counts the most. They should be the ones screaming the loudest about the ABC mockumentary. That they aren't tells you all you need to know, as if you didn't already know it.

ITEM: Scholastic Replaces 'The Path to 9/11' Classroom Guide With New Discussion Materials Focusing on Critical Thinking and Media Literacy Skills.

"After a thorough review of the original guide that we offered online to about 25,000 high school teachers, we determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues," said Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic.

Pardon my critical thinking and media literacy skills there, Dick, but shouldn't those high standards have kicked in sometime before you offered the damn thing to the public? Isn't the proper response now the public exposure and firing of the persons responsible, assuming they aren't named Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic? And can't you work "Hero of the Glorious Revolution of 1994" into that title?

You Want a Menu? You Can't Handle a Menu!

Okay, so this morning I sit down with a cuppa and decide I'm going to peruse a few blogs at the bottom of my bookmarks, and up jumps Laurie Byrd:

This Menu Won't Last Long

Glenn Reynolds has some news about Ruby Tuesdays' new menu and I agree with him -- this one will not last long. They have removed all the healthy choices and even removed the nutritional info on the menu. One of his readers pointed out that Applebee's has an excellent Weight Watchers' menu. I had lunch at Applebee's a couple of months ago and had the Steak and Shrimp Skewers and the French Onion soup from the Weight Watchers menu and both were great.

Okay, I am glad that someone saw fit to amplify Glenn's comments--we just can't shed enough light on the problem of shrinking health-food choices among people who get off their butts long enough to get in a car and drive somewhere so they can sit down again and have someone feed them--but...

Ruby Tuesday's? Isn't that like some fifth-tier TGI Friday's? One of those chains routinely located such that, if you were in the parking lot and felt a sudden urge to view grass, or a tree, or anything growing without the aid of a concrete container, you'd have to get back in the car and waste a quarter tank of gas? Are we talking about the same Ruby Tuesday's? The one whose recent teevee ads touted the culinary inspiration of putting onion rings on top of a cheeseburger? Apparently so all the regurgitative elements hit your digestive tract at once?

It's a freakin' fast-food factory. If you're that concerned about being healthy you might start worrying about what you're eating instead of how much, and how many times the cook has washed his hands this month. Mental incapacitation caused by a fast-food joint altering its menu goes a long way towards explaining why these people are still pissing their pants five years later.

I once remarked, only half facetiously, that in a modern-day American Civil War the North wouldn't need to field an army, just find a way to lower the air temperature in Dixie to 37º F and hold it there for three days until the mass surrender was completed. Imagine what easy pickings these people would be if there truly were terrorists lurking behind every mailbox. Sheesh, altering the pick-up hours inside the lid could cause a stampede in select neighborhoods, apparently.

My Day. How's Your's?

It started with the morning paper telling me, in a tiny sidebar, that hospitalizations due to July 4th fireworks injuries (mostly of children) in this, the first year of Indiana's new What The Fuck, Just Go Nuts fireworks law were almost doubled. In newspaperese this is described as injuries being "on the rise". The brief note also quoted the State Department of Health, which cautioned against drawing any conclusions from the data, saying that it would need at least five years of information before any real patterns emerged. Throwing caution to the winds, like so much burning phosphorus, I drew the single conclusion that the same payoffs which reached the State Fire Marshal found their way to the Health Department, and that the contract lasts five years.

Then this evening I'm decompressing from another visit with Mom, aka Crazy Mom, and a Budweiser commercial comes on. I'd gone into the kitchen and forgot to hit the mute button, and I walked in just as the thing ended with the Budweiser Credo. It had been a while since I'd heard it, so let's all experience it together, shall we?

We know of no brand produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age.

I'm guessing that perhaps, seeing as how you have enough technical knowledge to know what B-E-E-R spells, you understand this to be complete bullshit, something on par with it being legal in this country to label anything trapped in a net "Cod", provided it looks as if it might be able to swim. Are they buying extra-fancy rice to puff up their brew now? Replace the "beechwood" stainless-steel "aging" tanks with plutonium? What?

Or are they adding in the salaries of all the various Busches involved? Plus milage? The most expensive thing about a Budweiser is all the advertising they bought to keep reminding you the stuff is for drinking. But none of that involves the cost "to brew and age", unless by that you include the fact that without advertising, marketing, and arm twisting nobody'd use the stuff to shampoo a dog.

Which would still raise the question "So why does Michelob cost more?" But never mind that now, because this comes on the same day I'd watched a second news cycle about the delayed shuttle launch. Now, once again, even if you believe that 95% of the NASA budget should be diverted into something that actually benefits people who don't rely on that figure for their weekly paycheck, the odds are that you look upon NASA more kindly than I. Perhaps the pocket calculator makes your life easier, or you really, really enjoy your TANG. Even so, I think we all might be a little concerned that unless something of theirs actually blows up with Americans inside, all news from NASA is of the Gee Whiz Ain't This Technology Stuff Great variety. What I'd really like to see is a second counter, just below the Mission Clock, ticking off just how much this particular circus is costing us each minute. 'Course it would need to be a much bigger clock.

I'll bet it's even more than Budweiser.

There's a curious lack of curiosity on the part of teevee "reporters" covering the story; I seem to recall that unless NASA ups its shuttle launch rate by something like 400% and keeps it there for the rest of the decade the space station project is kaput. I'd be happy to provide you with the actual details here, except nobody on teevee thought it was any of my business, apparently.

Instead, I heard one hairdo explain that NASA might be forced to consider relaxing its safety rules and permitting a night launch. Now please explain to me how those words got into his mouth if not courtesy NASA's public affairs director and an open bar. Imagine if your surgeon explained to you that they'd decided to relax their safety rules in the interests of getting your surgery finished on time. This (I imagine you replying) does not constitute relaxation! In fact it constitutes ignoring. Ignoring to a degree which can only be described as No You Fucking Aren't.

But then, your surgeon's safety record probably isn't what NASA's is.

I think they need a credo. Maybe "NASA: Nobody Said We Wouldn't Get Our Hair Mussed."

A little while later my Poor Wife came downstairs and we watched enough of Olbermann that I got to see Richard Ben-Viniste call Tom Kean "a Great American." This, in a discussion of why Kean, co-chair of a 9/11 commission which refused to lay a glove on anyone except New York's 911 operators, is now shilling an ABC mockudrama blaming the whole thing on Bill Clinton's Penis. A Great American who now pockets some Hollywood cash for signing off on the idea that Clinton was too preoccupied with Monica Lewinsky to get bin Laden. That would be the same Bill Clinton whose failed attempt to get bin Laden was, at the time, described as an attempt to get the news off Monica Lewinsky.

Great American? Hell, in my book Tom Kean is a veritable NASA of Americans. He is to this Republic what a free press is. He's the fuckin' King of Beers, too. We salute you, Governor. Up until this week that Commission of yours was like a joke without a punchline.

The Only Show in Town

The more I see doctors the more highly I think of folk healers.

I haven't written about my mother's dementia much, in part because it's grindingly mundane--she doesn't steal cars or knock over convenience stores, which is how I plan to use mine--and in part because it's painful and sad and tough to get much of a lesson from, unless "you need to be patient" is a lesson you'd enjoy hearing over and over, in which case you should take up fishing.

But yesterday was the long-awaitied meeting with the docs at the Center on Aging where she took a three-hour battery of tests two weeks ago. My sister and I had pinned some hopes on their findings soothing the periodic torrents over finances and living arrangements we've been riding out for nearly four months now.

So there's good news and bad news. Only it's the same news.

We're ushered into a conference room with the doctor and a replacement for the vacationing social worker, and immediately I'm pissed because there should be two doctors--a geriatric specialist and a neurologist--and I'm pretty sure I know which one we're getting (the lower-cost-per-billing-hour one) and which one we really need to talk to (the other one). And the, yes, geriatric physician opens with a little patter and a here's-what-I'll-cover speech, then she starts in on Mom's physical ailments, which are not great, really. She's got arthritis; both ankles and one knee trouble her especially, and they prescribe some physical therapy. And here's a handout on Kegel exercises for incontinence....

Okay, let's hold it just a minute. This is the point at which, if I behaved the way the little voices tell me to rather than hiding behind a thin veneer of civility (it's peeling in a few places, BTW) I jump up out of my purple-upholstered conference-room chair and say, in a voice that probably gets the receptionist to dial 911, "This woman is 80 years old! I don't know how long she's been wetting the bed--she never put that in the Xmas cards--but I know it's gone on for a while, and I know she's a product of the American medical factory system, because I'm the one who refills her prescriptions, and because for the last ten years her allopathic adventures, and those of her late husband, in the great gray plains of southern Florida constitute 90% of the conversations we have had in that period, and you tell me that in all that time no one ever fucking mentioned Kegel exercises to her?"

Naturally, I just kept my seat and kept staring at the doc.

Time to move on to the main event--everything's showbiz, ain't it?--her mental diminution. Out comes everyone's copy of a chart and a little soft-shoe about what the doctor who isn't there, but should be, was doing with All Those Tests. And I've got my graph cocked sideways, trying to read with one eye the categories on the bottom of the chart because they've been printed at a 90º angle to the rest of the thing, when the doctor announces that they found neither Alzheimer's nor dementia.

Okay, "stunned" is far to strong a word--for me, not for my sister, for whom it's an understatement--because I understood there could be many another possible explanation. I'm surprised to hear "dementia" fly out the window, because, well, because she's demented. At least in the common sense. And now the doctor's got her hands up, palms out, indicating first where "normal" is located, then where "dementia" falls, and finally the playground in the middle where, she says, Mom is now in residence. We don't know, she says--outnumbering those of us on the opposite side of the table via pronoun--whether she'll slide to the far end of the scale or not. Some do and some don't. In answer to my sister's rather desperate challenge, she tells us that this is a diagnosis made of conjecture, not fact.

My sister's face is, briefly, flashing different colors like a cuttlefish, and she may be developing a tic. And the doctor winds up and lets fly: we think this is all a result of your recent bereavement, we're taking you off the Alzeheimer's medication and putting you on Zoloft, and we're cutting your thyroid medicine in half because that might be part of it.

Ah. That's great news, doc. That's great news, except. I'm thrilled to death you think this is something which might be curable as opposed to something which is not. But I'm thinking that if we bet our respective salaries on the outcome you can shake hands with your new landlord. And the other part is this: I know that the elderly woman to my left here has heard exactly what the dog in that Larsen cartoon hears: Blah blah blah NO ALZHEIMER'S blah blah.

And she did, of course. In fairness, what they did find was moderate-to-severe impairment on almost every component of her cognitive processes, especially so in the matter of managing multi-layered tasks (their examples, tellingly, were driving a car and cooking, neither of which Mom now does, but which are the sort of tasks that might bring a family to that conference room in the first place). But none of that was going to register with Mom. NO ALZHEIMER'S. I don't have that. I told you so.

Let's pause another time. I've used "Alzheimer's" or "dementia" to describe what was going on with my mother, but not in a diagnostic sense, just for ease of explanation. I had to defend myself to her a couple dozen times when she accused me of "saying she has that" (it was always "that"). I had to lecture my sister about the difference between looking up a prescription medication online and understanding what's going on with a patient. I cringed when her lawyer told her she had to start living with the fact. We did not know. Even if we did, what we knew was a word. The popular imagination is always long on imagining. And there was no bigger problem in all that than how my Mom took it. The A-word is about as welcome in retirement communities as a condom dispenser in the Pope's washroom, but it's only one of about 150 forms of dementia, and that's just for starters.

But then NO ALZHEIMER'S. This unleashed a veritable running faucet of improv from Mom, who kept babbling as the doctor went through the rest of the categories on the chart, impervious. It had the makings of a fine comic scene, the doc explaining how the woman next to me was just understandably depressed and anxious, while the subject babbled away about checkbooks and snow shovels. Then the doctor exited so the social worker could go about the real-world tasks of convincing us what we needed to do about it (a five-day-a-week grief counseling marathon Mom nixed), which naturally involved actually trying to talk to the patient now, something which was now next to impossible because she was off in They Won't Let Me Have Credit Cards land. The social worker, I think, finally began to get it, but of course she's just filling-in, and no way is that closing episode gonna get reported back to the MDeities.

Again, don't get me wrong. I trust the judgment. I accept that things are not always worked out on the first attempt, in no small part because we work from the easiest and most likely assumptions. I hope that the change in medication is the answer, and that we get our Mom back some day soon. And I know that the road ahead is just a boulder field and I can't expect anything better. But still, there's this distinct impression that what you get from the medical profession these days is the same thing you get at The Gap, rows of shelves full of ready-to-wears, neatly sized, except that you have to keep trying things on to find something that nearly fits. And so we shall.

Happy Birthday

Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard
September 1, 1868 --December 26, 1930