Memento
I've been visiting my family in Southeastern Pennsylvania. I navigate the country byways that once were so familiar, and now seem less so. Names of streets, and neighborhoods that had once been hardwired into my memory can be elusive after spending years living away from my childhood stomping grounds. In the end there may be only so much storage space on our aging cerebral hard drives. I try to comfort myself with my knowledge of new arcane routes spread across the American West which now command the limited space once staked out by my knowledge of East Coast highways.
Among the friends I've visited this week has been an old friend of mine and my family. He's one of the smartest and funniest people I've had the pleasure of knowing. With an I.Q. of 180, he helped write the software that made the Apollo space program a success, and then went on to a successful career in academia. Whenever I have visited him over the years, he has been a font of information, displaying broad ranging interests from literature to electronics, to machining, to architecture, to home building. His garage was home to oscilloscopes and milling machines. He rebuilt autos and modified them with little regard for accepted mechanical protocols or social prejudices. A generous man, he bequeathed to me one of his cars when I went to university, which lasted me till I got my first job following graduation. I think he is as fond of me as I am of him.
He appears physically healthy, although, he now resides in a nursing home, a sufferer from Alzheimer's disease. His fecund mind did little to stave off the encroachment of beta amyloids in his cerebrum which have in turn diminished his short term memory. For the most part our conversations now consist of his asking questions of me as I try to find new ways to answer them honestly, but differently from his previous identical queries, which too often transpired only a few minutes before. I was dismayed when we first enacted this parody some years ago. It bothers me less now and I strive to rephrase my answers in ways that will add more information for him while challenging my own verbal abilities. He is a kind of temporally disjointed Bodhisattva. Always cheerful, and happy for my companionship, while simultaneously being adrift in time, like Billy Pilgrim, immersed inexorably in the here and now, yet sadly absent a sense of the continuum the rest of us naturally impose on our experience to help us make sense of our lives.
