See what's become of me
Time, time, timeSee what's become of meWhile I looked around for my possibilities
I was so hard to pleaseLook aroundLeaves are brownAnd the sky is a hazy shade of winter
And here I am. 71 years old, and no more clue about the why of me than I ever had. I suppose I know WHO I am, but even that could be argued. I just am. But this aging thing is confusing at the best of times. The good news, at least physically, is it turns out I really am my fathers daughter. Still strong and vigorous, I still move well. Mentally, well, I *think* I’m in good shape. Truth is, if something is wrong, it’d be hard to tell. “Something,” of course, is any form of dementia. Losing dad to dementia, I worried - in large part because I’m so much like him - that I was doomed to the same fate as him. But then I discovered a group of men he worked with on Eniwetok all suffered their demise due to Lewy Body Dementia. A series of TIAs, similar loss of facilities and other identical symptoms delivered the clear message that my dads dementia was environmental in origin. Years of working around nukes, especially the years spent retrieving spent nukes in the Marshall Islands..swimming and fishing and diving in those same waters..all that radiation ate away at his exemplary engineer’s brain, leaving potholes that ultimately stopped him in his tracks. But of course an environmental cause for his dementia meant no genetic gift to me. So if there IS some strange mental deviation lurking, growing, it’s all mine. My mother never lost her brain. But then, karma would dictate she bear witness to that which she wrought.
There’s more, but I’m out of interest in continuing right now. More later. So much more. It’s time I wrote about life again.
