Who's there? Sounds in the night

How to Remember With No Strings Attached

Written for the Orland Park Patch -- March 22, 2012

Arthur (Ed) Wall



Tom noticed it before I did. My cat sleeps more than I do, but more lightly, so he woke me up not long after I had gone to bed. He had heard someone in my TV room, and he didn't like that. Tom and I have lived by ourselves in an Orland Park condo ever since my wife died.

It was an alert neighbor, who noticed I had forgotten to close my garage door. He popped in to tell me about it. I thanked him, he left, I pushed the button to close the door, returned to bed and apparently sloshed the experience around in my head like the kind of dream that's still there when you wake up.

I had just celebrated in birthday, denying that my 87 candles had anything to do with the arrival of 80-degree weather. When I woke up with that garage door episode in my mind, I realized that it was time to deal with the hazards of short-term memory loss. Senior discounts may include a 20 percent reduction in memory. A 15 percent discount for eye glasses may be society's way of dealing with 20 percent loss of eyesight.

I don't get around as fast as I used to, even though I keep my power chair and scooter batteries fully charged. It is more than good luck to live just a mile from my daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren. I'm surrounded by good neighbors, so serene in their neighborliness that sometimes I don't even know who shoveled snow away from my door.

When there is no snow I glide around neighborhood sidewalks on my four-wheel scooter. I see other seniors, and juniors too, on wheels or on feet. A scooter will take its operator anyplace where the sidewalks go, despite the thumps from uneven walkways and the challenges of misfit mini-ramps from sidewalk to street.

There are a lot of us in Orland Park, Tinley Park and nearby areas who forget things. I don't want you to wake up some night to shouts from a good neighbor in your home, so I'll tell you what I did. I made a list of things I have forgotten at one time or another, and printed a form via my computer.

I've arranged this simple form on a half sheet of letter-size paper, so I can make a quick and easy check each night before bedtime. The things I need to check are whether outside doors are locked, the garage door is closed, the thermostat is adjusted, blinds closed, prescriptions swallowed, outside lights turned on and Tom fed.

The final issue, of course, is how to remember to fill out the memory form. If an answer to that comes in a dream, I'll let you know.

Once upon a time the GOP...

In western New York state my great grandpa, Marcus Kinne, cheered for John C. Fremont, the first presidential candidate of the anti-slavery Republican Party. Fremont lost to James Buchanan in the 1956 election, but Great Grandpa Kinne (Kinney) had a winner next time.

Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant after him, were talked about as though they were family friends, although they were not, when I was a little kid living with my grandparents. Everybody I knew when I was eight or ten years old in Chautauqua County, N.Y., was a Republican.

Jamestown, my hometown, had been an active station on the underground railroad. It provided many men for the Union army. I saw a few of the Civil War veterans during Fourth of July parades. By then, 1930 or thereabouts, their marching days were only memories and they rode in open cars.

My grandparents and aunts and cousins, enthusiastic members of the party of Lincoln, would be astonished by the 2012 GOP and the social and political elitism celebrated by its presidential candidates.

When I was born the president was Calvin Coolidge. When I was a little kid, Herbert Hoover was president. After that, I became a teenager and Franklin D. Roosevelt lived in the White House. The minimum voting age was 21, so I cast my first president ballot for Harry Truman. By then my grandparents had passed on to a non-partisan realm, and never knew that the child they once nourished grew up to vote for a Democrat. In some respects the two major parties had swapped priorities.

A group has complained that some deceased Jews were baptized by strangers, who were asked to cease and desist. I have no reason to think that my grandparents and their parents have thus been baptized, and I’m certain they would not approve. But if anyone should tamper with those 19th century records, maybe they will be kind enough to change great grandpa’s party affiliation to Democrat, the current party of emancipation and benevolent reconstruction.