March 11, 2024

Sometimes the senior stuff seems to pile up, questions and doubt cloud the days. Nothing new about it here, or for anyone else in this fix. The prescription vials collect on the kitchen counter, coming with the barrage of ambiguous guidance, speculation, paperwork.

We break through all that: no looking inward, no cosmic wondering what it means or where we’re going. We have this place, still strangely alien, a place we still are learning. We have the children, near and far, and others who welcomed us as we settled here, and have shown us love and given us strength.

Strength means step forward, always, which means go to the mountains. In Virginia they were 90 minutes away, here only a half-hour. That’s why they call it Upstate. You steer up U.S. 25 then S.C. 11 and you’re there. Why go? Because the mountains, in their dark, intense, magical way, make life rich, make us stronger.

The Appalachians, call them the Blue Ridge from western Virginia and on south, are forest and rocks. Rocks everywhere, boulders, cliff overhangs, jagged edges that can tear flesh. In North Carolina, on a straight shot from Asheville, the mountains stretch west. Near Waynesville they grow into massive hulks and become the Great Smokies. They also turn into South Carolina, where they start to peter out near the little town of Pickens and Table Rock Mountain.

Table Rock, at about 3,100 feet isn’t impressive by Blue Ridge measurements. And the trail, marked with red tree markers or blazes, is only three and a half miles, which sounds like not so much. It starts near Carrick Creek, which rushes down from some uncertain point high and west. The trail then curls up rough ground and flights of rock stairs. For a short stretch, a couple of hundred feet, it levels then cuts back among massive boulders and twisted foot-thick roots.

Above, the view is of the sheer surface of the approach to the summit. The trail narrows through the piles of boulders, allowing one person to sidestep through at risk of snapping an ankle. The panoramic view, fifty or more miles of the deep-green country starts to emerge. A shelter stands near the precipice just past the midway point. Rest here then push on, or quit.

From the shelter the trail is level for a hundred feet then circumvents a house-size rock. It faces the ridge and twists upward again. A stretch of discarded orange environmental mesh lies along the east side of the trail, a sign of a brief pause in the climb, a spot called Panther Gap.

Panther Gap is a turn. The trail levels then climbs, levels out, climbs again across fallen trees, more roots and boulders. The rock mass gets thicker, the trail disappears. But the red blazes are there. The climber faces a sheer rock wall. The intoxicating view of nearby peaks explodes in every direction. Foot-size cuts in the rocks allow steps directly across the face of the wall.

The trail picks up above then levels, easy walking to a new turn, then suddenly becomes a tangle of pits and dips and trenches. It rises again to a second rock wall. Beyond that a turn pivots to a treeless precipice, facing south, back into woods to the ten-foot-square clearing marking the Table Rock summit.

The path winds down sharply to a rock plateau, the red blazes are painted on the surface. It pushes through underbrush to the broad granite patio that overlooks the reservoir, which shimmers in deep, clear blue. The North Carolina peaks create the green horizon to the northeast, towards Asheville. Here, draw breath and get a glimpse of the world God created, the reason people struggle to come to this place.

The descent back to Panther Gap is fast and treacherous. Gravity seems to pull the rocks downward. From the Gap the orange-blazed Ridge Trail winds up and across six climbs to 3,400-foot-high Pinnacle Peak, the state’s second-highest. Ridge is up, down, then rolls into the next climb. The fourth climb snakes through underbrush, an endless switchback. The last one wraps around Pinnacle then leads into the summit clearing. No spectacular vistas, just forest and silence.

From Pinnacle the trail leads only down, a dangerous quarter-mile headlong drop to an intersection with the Foothills Trail, which crosses wilderness for 76 miles to Oconee State Park, near the wild scenic Chattooga River, the S.C.-Georgia state line.

In that direction, northwest, Foothills makes a sudden right-angle turn. It drops down on sharp switchbacks, showing the north side of Pinnacle peak.

Sassafras Mountain is the next access point, the tourist attraction with lovely views of four states. Foothills from Pinnacle ascends through jungle-like forest, narrowing then broadening across a thundering creek, then rises and keeps rising to the summit.

The trail circles the Sassafras observation platform downward into a westerly whirlwind tumble to a lonely junction called Chimney Top, then continues for two miles down to a tiny off-the-highway place called Laurel Valley, the last westbound road access for 30 miles.

The other direction, east from Pinnacle, is the way home. From the Foothills junction the trail turns into culverts, across roots and rocks yet again, then levels again. Beyond a sudden, twisting drop, it opens to a narrow, rocky platform called Bald Knob at 2,800 feet. Beyond the ledge you see only the dazzling open sky and the hazy valley out to the horizon.

Navigating the rock means delicate balance, footfalls in the chiseled pits to a sharp turn. The trail plunges four miles back to civilization, the park nature center and Table Rock Lake, where parents bring their children to show them nature at its wildest and sweetest. Here Carrick Creek flows noisily over the rocks into pools shallow enough for wading. It’s a happy place, populated in good weather by couples, dogwalkers, families with young kids.

Exhaustion settles in along with faith, renewed in wild country, overcoming the shadows. We may travel farther. A fourth trail encircles the lake, a pretty stretch of cut-through that finishes at the boathouse. Then, a mile back towards the park gate, the trailhead for the Palmetto Trail climbs, then stretches away from the park into wilderness that is again deep, and silent.

March 4, 2024

We leaned over the railing of Greenville’s Falls Park Bridge and watched the brown Reedy River rush over the rocks. Canada geese waded in the shallows, but then the river is not especially deep anywhere. Rivers, strangely, have something to do with the state’s history, and its tragic legacy as the setting for the start of the Civil War.

On a scale of great to picayune, our Reedy River barely registers, it’s more of a stream. Below the city it descends into the state’s backwater country, which, like much of the rural South, has barely been touched by time.

Twenty-seven years ago a friend loaned us a vacation house on Kiawah Island, just south of Charleston. I drove with the kids down I-95 from Virginia, Sandy flew. Crossing the state line at Dillon, we stayed with the interstate to Florence and turned onto S.C. 52, then mostly two lanes through the Palmetto State’s deepest boondocks.

We chugged along the near-empty road, ever southeast, into vernal Low Country forestland through poverty-stricken pockets of the Deep South. Isolated collections of ramshackle clapboard cabins appeared then fell away behind us, along with occasional one-pump gas stations and general stores. Skinny kids loitered here and there or sat on front steps, staring as we passed.

This went on for hours. Our old Buick Skylark wasn’t air conditioned, we sweated as the Spanish moss seemed to close in amidst the stretches of neglect and want, the raw reality of rural South Carolina.

Eventually we crossed the Santee River, the state’s second-longest, and passed giant Lake Moultrie. We skirted massive Francis Marion National Forest. All signs of even primitive civilization fell away. Then suddenly we were on I-26, back in the twentieth century.

The memory of that trek through the South’s underside now registers as unreal as we watch the Reedy flow through hip, prosperous downtown Greenville.

Two years ago we took the usual interstate route, I-385, I-26, I-95 to Hilton Head for a weekend. We left the highway at U.S. 278 and headed east for 20 miles on the well-traveled vacation/tourist route that eventually crosses Mackey Creek to the island. For that short distance the remoteness presses in, woods and bleak outcroppings of Southern bareness and poverty, until the vacation rental signs show up. Nothing much had changed.

The 60-mile-long Reedy becomes a metaphor for what we see, go-go new prosperity against the dark backwoods past. From the southern end of the Blue Ridge it approaches Greenville. Close to town it follows the Swamp Rabbit Trail, a walking and bike path past Furman University and the suburban settlement of Traveler’s Rest. It passes the hulks of long-closed textile mills.

The river is still mildly polluted from decades of industrial runoff. The city has posted signs warning against wading, but kids do it anyway. Still, it offers tourists a nice view from the riverwalk in the middle of town, the highlight of Falls Park. People lounge on benches along the bank, served by a couple of bars. A patch of greenery further along is fine for picnics and, in summer, the town’s Shakespeare festival.

South of the city it passes through Congaree Nature Preserve, a pretty patch of woodland. The city created the Preserve to get some use from the land ruined by toxic chemicals and metals from the river that prevented residential development. Eventually it joins the Saluda River, which widens into Lake Greenwood in Laurens County.

The Reedy becomes part of a network of dozens of minor-league rivers. The Edisto, North Edisto, Sampit, and Salkenhatchie drain the southern tier of the state. Most of the others, including the Black, Broad, and Congaree, are tributaries of the Santee or the Pee Dee Rivers.

The rivers flow uniformly southeast, from the Upstate corner that abuts Georgia and North Carolina through the Midlands and Columbia to the Low Country and its gold coast, Myrtle Beach, Charleston, Hilton Head.

South Carolina, apart from its Upstate share of the Blue Ridge, is a water-soaked state. The rivers are fed by hundreds of tributaries, known and unknown, that maintain the damp soil that was critical for the antebellum Low Country plantation crops, rice, cotton, indigo, planted, worked, and harvested by slaves.

The state’s slave economy created vast wealth for the slaveowners. Slaves built the lovely homes of Charleston and environs, which have become tourist attractions. Imprints of their fingerprints, including children’s fingerprints, can be found on the bricks.

In June 2018 Charleston issued a resolution of apology for its role in the slave trade signed by Mayor John Tecklenberg: “Recognizing, denouncing and apologizing on behalf of the city of Charleston for its role in regulating, supporting, and fostering slavery and the resulting atrocities inflicted by the institution of slavery … “

The resolution goes on to acknowledge that 40 percent of enslaved Africans arrived at the Port of Charleston and that hundreds of thousands of African Americans today can trace their ancestry to Africans who arrived in Charleston. It continues: “notwithstanding the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, institutionalized discrimination continued in many parts of the country … through Jim Crow laws.”

The document pledges that the mayor and city council will work to end discrimination in schools, businesses, and institutions doing business with the city. So there’s that.

We may believe it’s a long intellectual leap to connect our tourist-attraction hometown river with the state’s natural flow of groundwater, rich cash crops, slavery, and war. But two hundred years ago, and less, that’s the way it was in South Carolina. That’s why the rebels attacked at Fort Sumter in 1861. And why, in 2018, Charleston apologized.

February 26, 2024

Millions of people turned 75 in September 1938, as I did yesterday. That month British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain created his sad legacy when, after three meetings with Hitler, he announced that he and the Fuhrer, in Munich, Germany, had achieved “peace in our time.” The two leaders, one naive, the other ruthless, agreed along with France and fascist Italy that Nazi Germany should annex a huge chunk of Czechoslovakia.

Germany had already seized Austria. As initial negotiations on Czechoslovakia went nowhere, Hitler threatened to invade the country. The British government began to prepare for war. On September 29 the Czech government bowed to the political pressure. The next day at 1:30 AM the Munich Agreement was reached.

Czechoslovakia ceded its Sudentenland region to Germany. Later that day Chamberlain asked Hitler to sign a statement that the PM said was “symbolic of the desire of our two countries never to go to war with one another again.” Hitler signed.

On returning to Britain that same day Chamberlain made his tragic “peace in our time” speech. He was welcomed by the Brits as a hero who had kept the country out of war. A few months later, in March 1939, Hitler broke his promise to respect Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty and German troops occupied the rest of the country. In August Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact. On September 1 Germany and the Soviets invaded Poland, starting World War II.

Through the decades the names “Chamberlain” and “Munich” have become synonymous with the shameful term, “appeasement.” 

Today, on the first day of my 76th year, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is in recess, ignoring a bill passed by the Senate by a 70-29 vote to provide $60 billion in military aid to Ukraine, 90 percent of which would be spent in the U.S.

Saturday, the 24th, was the second anniversary of the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that, if successful, will position Russian forces on the borders of four of America’s NATO allies. Russia continues to rain missiles on Ukraine’s cities, slaughtering innocents. The Republicans refuse to support funding for Ukraine because they say they’re focused on “border security.”

The poverty-stricken migrants crossing the southern border aren’t launching missiles and rockets at U.S. cities.

Turning 75 means I’m older than most people I know. Those of us in our eighth decade don’t know everything, but we remember lots of things. Folks who grew up in the second half of the twentieth century witnessed a vast scope of human tragedy unfold: in Vietnam, Cambodia, Central America, the Middle East, Central Africa. Then Iran. Then the Middle East again. Then Iraq. Then Afghanistan.

Some of these crises burned out, some have reignited. But the baseline threat to American security for 46 years was confrontation with the Soviet Union. Two months after I was born, in April 1949, the Western powers established NATO as the bulwark of defense against the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact in Central Europe. The USSR imploded in 1991. Thirty-one countries now are NATO members. They face the Russian Federation led by the dictator who launched the Ukraine war, with all its atrocity and brutality.

John Bolton, Trump’s third National Security Adviser, reports in his powerful memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” that Trump as president viewed NATO as a transactional arrangement based on members’ financial contribution, set at 2 percent of GNP. Because some members didn’t reach that benchmark, he threatened again and again to withdraw the U.S. from NATO. That began at the NATO 2017 Brussels summit, five years before the Alliance stepped up to buttress Ukraine’s defense.

Trump is back with the same threats, applause lines for Republicans (and others) who ignore or belittle America’s historic leadership of the Western alliance. They see easy votes among Americans angry at non-White poor people on our southern doorstep. They’re listening, not to the Ukrainian troops as they run out of bullets, but to the Trump cadre who don’t care about America’s traditional role in defending Western security.

In mid-month the Ukrainian military leadership conceded that Ukraine’s troops had withdrawn from the eastern front town of Avdiivka because of lack of ammunition. The Carnegie Endowment and Ukrainian sources in the field estimate that Russian artillery is firing at five times the rate as the Ukrainians.

Unverified Ukraine military sources said that from October 10, 2023 to February 17, 2024, Russia lost more than 47,000 men, 364 tanks, and about 750 armored fighting vehicles in the assault on Avdiivka. But the Russians keep coming.

America in the 1930s was scarred by tragedy. The country and the world lived through the Great Depression, which destroyed millions of jobs. U.S. unemployment exceeded 25 percent in 1933. Nazi and Communist sympathizers infected the country, including the federal government. But Americans lost interest in the world. Nazi Germany and fascist Italy seemed very far away. Japan may as well have been on another planet, although the Roosevelt administration knew better.

The isolationists had no problem with Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo. They found easier targets in Jews, Catholics, immigrants.

House Speaker Michael Johnson, on Trump’s orders, pounds his fist for border security. The Republican conference has fallen in line. Some of us have seen it before. “Appeasement” became an uncomfortable word when Chamberlain’s agreement revealed its tragedy eleven months later. The Chamberlain legacy, the stench of Munich, is still potent. It is in the air again.

For my birthday, family and friends gathered to launch me into a misty future, touching and sustaining me for the ride. Let’s hope and pray for a birthday wish: courage, forbearance, faith, for ourselves, and for those suffer, as history repeats itself.

February 19, 2024

The highway north out of Greer, South Carolina, S.C. 290, enters rural country on the way to Spartanburg. After a couple of miles it passes the massive Upstate Inland Port, a truck and rail depot where trailers are unloaded from trucks and loaded onto trains, and vice versa. From the highway the view is the silhouettes of hundreds of stacked trailers being hoisted by giant cranes to and from trains and trucks.

The road otherwise is a straight and level stretch of asphalt traveled mainly by the few folks who live in Duncan, a small place beyond scrub woods and small truck gardens, or Lyman, farther north, and other small towns that mix old farmhouses on big lots with treeless new subdivisions. So Greer is a fringe place: the last outer northeastern suburb of Greenville, which is the lively center of what’s called Upstate.

In our three years here we had never come out this way, but now we drove 15 miles up 290 through Duncan. For a stretch the two-lane highway was empty of traffic. Eventually we passed a few vacant industrial buildings, a barbecue place, a large church, and James F. Byrnes High School. These signs of civilization quickly fell away, the road took us back through more scrub, offset by the occasional ramshackle homestead bordered by wire fencing. We exhaled and turned back.

Greer has a business district, a museum, a couple of streets of small shops and upscale restaurants. We stopped at the Stomping Grounds for a sandwich and coffee. It’s furnished with small tables against a couple of sofas and preserves the well-worn brick walls of the neighboring buildings. A large wall sign, “C.O.F.F.E.E., Christ Offers Forgiveness For Everyone Everywhere” reminded me we’re in the revivalist Southland.

The coffee was tangy and hot. I took a long sip. Was I forgiven? I couldn’t tell.

The place was nearly empty, a couple of guys sat nearby looking at a laptop, four older folks sat near the door nursing drinks and lunch. It was Hemingway’s clean well-lighted place. We sat and reviewed our lists of things to do, the medical appointments, the home maintenance chores, while time marches relentlessly before our eyes.

Up the street, a couple ate lunch at a sidewalk table in front of a clothing store, the “Trades Café.” We walked in, the place was not one but four tidy antique dress shops melded to a tiny restaurant, where folks sat dining alongside the racks.

We smiled at the oddness of it, lunch in a dress shop. Beyond the three or four blocks of downtown the place has some energy to it, a well-groomed park, a kids’ playground, ballfields, a modern city hall, a new block-like Hampton Inn that clashes bizarrely with the style of the old brick and frame houses nearby.

A mile or so from the town center acres of red Carolina clay are being bulldozed to make room for new homes, condos, and an apartment complex.

The city limits extend miles north, encompassing a couple of manmade lakes and up I-85 towards Charlotte. To the southeast Greer runs to Greenville’s intense commercial/retail strip where the big-box stores, fast-food outlets, and auto dealerships are massed astride the I-385 spur, which runs into the city or southeast towards Columbia.

It’s called the “city” of Greer, population 35,000 or so at the last census, so very different from the “city” of Cowan, Tenn., population once over 2,000, now down to 1,500, where Sandy grew up. Greer is in some ways more like the “village” of Ridgewood, N.J., 20 miles west of New York City, home to 25,000, where I lived as a kid. In both places the central business district is more or less intact, with the shops, restaurants, and coffee bars in a neat symmetrical grid.

Ridgewood’s downtown is far larger, oriented to its well-off profile. When I joined the Marines and moved away decades ago, the place exploded with affluence as Wall Street types bought homes and over the years demolished hundreds and rebuilt them twice the size. The old Ridgewood Lawns neighborhood now has a weird, klutzy look to it, with many if not most once-humble Cape Cod foundations supporting three grafted-on colonial levels, like plastic surgery gone wrong.

Cowan, two states due west of Greer, is pastureland, one main street, two traffic signals, a post office, a gas station, a fast-Mexican food outlet, a couple of secondhand shops. The railroad museum is the anchor. Cowan, just west and north of the Cumberland Plateau, once prospered as a rail stop but slid into depression when the shoe factory and cement plant closed.  The once-cozy Cowan Café turned into the Mexican place. Young folks moved away. Sandy’s parents stayed until her dad lost his job, then left for Nashville.

The common thread linking Greer and Ridgewood is nearness to a larger city; Greer without Greenville and Ridgewood without New York both might look like Cowan. When we want to go “downtown” we don’t go to Greer.

For a short, hectic year, 1986, we lived in Red Bank, N.J., roughly 50 miles south of New York. It seemed right at the time, a clone of Ridgewood, but work drove us to Virginia in ‘87. The Lake Ridge section of Woodbridge, Va., is a series of now-pricey subdivisions linked to strip malls. The main artery is a six-lane thoroughfare nearly always gridlocked with commuters to D.C. and the federal contractor ghettoes of northern Virginia. We left without a backward glance.     

Our last visits to Ridgewood (two years ago) and Cowan (one year) tugged the chains of memory, of the quiet childhood hometown in the years before the chic boutiques, and the roughhewn Middle Tennessee community that calls itself a city. Special, lifelong-lasting things happened for us in those vastly different places.

The past lingers forever, but Ridgewood ravaged itself by tearing down the venerable old firehouse and putting up a multi-level parking garage.  Happy places I recall—faintly—the little bookstore, Trilby’s, and the stationary store, Drapkins, disappeared decades ago. The church elementary school closed a lifetime ago. Cowan some years back lost its only supermarket, a modestly classy bed-and-breakfast, an Italian restaurant, and a bagel shop. People who want those things don’t go there anymore.

Now we have Greer with the Stomping Grounds and its revivalist wall décor, and the Trades Café for lunch and browsing used-clothing racks, if we ever want to. There’s a Great Bay Oyster House, four hours from the coast, a Brass Beard Barber Shop, a Cartwright Food Hall, a Namaste Fitness Studio on Jason Street. Then the Stomping Grounds. Coffee, for sure. Forgiveness, who knows? Memories, probably not.

February 12, 2024

The woman on the other end of the line spoke slowly, loudly, deliberately, spelling out the website “newprograminformation.com”:  “EN … EE … DUBILYEW …” and so on, pausing for breath between each letter. I did not ask her if she thought I was a doddering old coot, because she obviously did. After all, I am a senior. Of course she was trying to be helpful. I thanked her for it. 

About fifteen years ago I stepped onto a Washington, D.C., Metro train heading home from work. It was rush hour, I saw no open seats and grasped a handrail. As the train moved forward a young woman rose and offered me her seat. I was a little embarrassed and declined. I was wearing what I thought was a sharp-looking business suit and carried a briefcase. She must have seen the gray wisps above my ears. You know what she thought.

It’s been years since I last rode the D.C. Metro. But the same thing happened again a couple of times on our trip to London last fall, as we rode the Underground. I gladly accepted the offers. I thought, well, the English are so polite. Or I am old. Or both.

It’s fun being a senior, up to a point. You get discounts, usually a couple of bucks, on movies, hotels, train tickets. Some restaurants have a “seniors” menu. Younger people sometimes hold the door. Seniors who do special things, like finishing marathons, caring for stray animals, or working at homeless shelters may be interviewed on the evening news. The questions usually are simple-minded and patronizing, the reporter looking for “yeses” or noes,” while wearing an impatient smile.

The U.S. is facing a presidential campaign of two old men, Biden 81, Trump, 77. Both have subjected the country to mental flubs typical of people their ages. Nikki Haley proposes a mental competency test for 75-year-old candidates. Many Americans agree.

In 1998 then-NBC anchor Tom Brokaw wrote a book entitled “The Greatest Generation,” a closeup of the lives of 46 people—men and women, famous and non-famous, servicemen and civilians, who served the country during World War II. The “greatest generation” became a catchphrase for all those who lived through the Depression, then stepped forward.

Among the well-known figures Brokaw covered were George H.W. Bush, Robert Dole, George Schultz, Mark Hatfield, and Daniel Inouye. Bush and Dole, following their heroic wartime service, had distinguished political careers. George Schultz is one of only two men to serve in four Cabinet posts. Hatfield served in the Navy at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, then as Oregon’s governor, and 30 years in the Senate. Inouye was wounded five times in Italy, lost his right arm, and won the Medal of Honor. Later he represented Hawaii for 49 years in the Senate.

These five and most of the greatest generation have passed into history. Many younger people know nothing about them. Time is speeding by in a kind of blur. About a year ago I met a couple of young folks who never heard of the Cold War. The term “Vietnam” doesn’t register either.

The oldsters of today are those who followed the greatest generation, including me. We had the Cold War, Vietnam, the Sixties. We had Kennedy, Goldwater, Nixon. We now are the ones who have simple words spelled out for us by others decades younger.

We are forgetting where we left our keys, and sometimes forget where we live. Senior moments, they’re called. As everyone knows, seniors slow down. Not everyone knows the costs, emotional and financial, to those close to them. Whimsical absent-mindedness we observe in elders may translate into something darker: six million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia.

The numbers are ominous. The Centers for Disease Control reports that for 2015-2017, Selective Cognitive Decline (SCD), an early symptom of dementia, ranged from 6 percent of South Dakota’s over-45 population to 16.2 percent in Arkansas. Percentages of adults over 45 with SCD who live alone go from 37.6 percent (Oregon) to 52.9 percent (Wisconsin).

Dementia, a disease of aging, is projected to affect some 152 million people worldwide by 2050. We know some victims: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Rita Hayworth. Charlton Heston. Glenn Campbell. Tony Bennett. Sean Connery.

Sources available suggest, ironically, that longer lives due to healthier lifestyles and better healthcare add to the dementia numbers. Exhaustive research back to the work of Alois Alzheimer from 1906 through 1911 and up through today have achieved breakthroughs in identifying dementia’s likely cause: buildup of mysterious proteins in the brain that tangle and clump to destroy the brain’s exquisite pathways.

In January 2023 the Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug, leqembi (lecanemab) for treatment of Alzheimer’s. A second drug, donanemab, is awaiting approval. The drugs showed modest effectiveness in extensive clinical trials. They may slow decline for months, perhaps for years for some. The disease remains incurable.  

Natalie de Souza, in a New York Review of Books review of How Not to Study a Disease: The Story of Alzheimer’s, by Karl Herrup, writes that “there is still an element of guesswork in designing Alzheimer’s drugs. … More optimistically, it is possible to reduce the risk of dementia without complete understanding of the biology of the disease.

“Several facets of general health—high blood pressure, smoking, obesity, lack of physical exercise, diabetes, loss of hearing, excessive alcohol consumption, depression, low educational level, low social contact, air pollution, and traumatic brain injury—have been observed to be risk factors for developing dementia.”

The young lady spelling out “newprograminformation” for me may well have assumed I was a statistic, one of those six million Americans. In her job manning the phones at a drug company, she probably has lots of experience with them. Some of them may react to her with anger or impatience, two-sure fire symptoms of that dark place. She did her best.

By the grace of God, some of the eighties- and nineties-plus crowd still drive, play golf, drink wine, run races. They’ve left behind childhood friends now lost to dementia, the insidious tangling within their brains. We see the victims wherever we find ourselves, teaching lessons about our lives and theirs, delicately fragile, but precious.