Memories:
Gus Kahn and Bert Van Alstyne

Memories, memories,
Dream of love, so true,
O'er the sea of memory
I'm drifting back to you.
Childhood days, wildwood days,
Among the birds and bees,
You left me alone,
But still you're my own,
In my beautiful memories.

That's the memories part. It's going to take a lot more effort to explain the "A" part. Just bear with me, if you can.

As I have said elsewhere among these threads, I live in a veterans' home. The one I live in is the largest such home in the United States. The population remains a fairly constant 1,125 veterans, some with their wives, who are residents of this particular home. The average age of all these folks is 74.8 years, and therein lies the rub.

Statistics indicate that if you are in the 75 year age group, there is a twenty per cent chance that you are in a beginning stage of Altzheimer's disease. The odds go up from there, so that by the age of 82, they are one in three.

While I don't (as yet) have Altzheimer's, I suffer another form of dementia that is the result of a stroke, and so I am familiar with that aspect of Altzheimer's that has to do with memory loss. The great good fortune of my situation is that as the part of my brain that relates to current or recent events has atrophied, the recollections of my early years has achieved a clarity that I believe is phenomenal. For our purposes here, the significant aspect of that is that I have begun to recall, along with other less esoteric things, the lyrics, or a substantial part of them, from all the old cowboy and other songs my dad taught me when I was a small boy. The other day I found myself singing snatches of Abdul Abulbul Amir. This in spite of the fact I can't remember what this morning's news headlines were. I have to write down the threads that interest me on a piece of paper, or I lose them completely and forever.

And so, after this longwinded intro, the question arises:

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU SUDDENLY WERE TOLD YOU HAD .............ALTSHEIMER'S DISEASE?