Rocking with grandma, a rock of ages

            Take a look at grandma’s rocking chair, handcrafted by her grandpa when the first Johnson –Andrew–was president. A collector might pay thousands for that chair and its memories, but there’s no bidding for grandma. Elderly chairs can be worth a lot of money, but elderly people are harder to invoice.

            Priceless antiquities in Syria and Iraq are damaged and destroyed by the Islamic State, works of art and architecture already ancient when Columbus cast off. The loss of the old and irreplaceable saddens and enrages people everywhere, even as it forever denies youths from now on an encounter with their ancestors. Age is everything, highly valued in auction rooms, even as people are massacred along with the artifacts. It can seem that to some persons, venerable columns and statues are more valuable than the people who live in their shadows.

            The other day I received an email with photos of famous women and men of the theater, close-ups of their familiar faces at ages 70, 80 and more. The sender invited me to look at the pictures, then look in the mirror. That was a nifty idea, but when I looked in the mirror for wrinkles I found that I have grown dimmer. A dim and foggy face looked back at me. Whom should I see first—the ophthalmologist or the dermatologist? Whom is a word used by retired editors and others of that sort.

            Some things are valued because of their age, including people, except maybe when they are being surveyed. One reason why some online pollsters get folks to tell their age up front is to spare themselves the trouble of reading responses from the elderly.

            In his latest book, “The Stranger,” Harlan Coben introduces his readers to a lawyer who specializes in eminent domain cases. The Supreme Court has allowed governments huge leeway in their seizure of private property for public purposes, but when I read the eminent domain reference in Coben’s novel I thought it could describe MSA at work. Multiple System Atrophy exercises a sort of eminent domain on the bodies of its hosts, as I noted when I looked into that mirror. As the poetic scholars of the King James Bible wrote in First Corinthians, seeing through a glass, darkly, is nothing new.

            Drinking through a glass, even lightly, is another matter. When I was given hiring and firing responsibilities at a daily newspaper I was told that many personnel issues would involve drinking, that journalists who favored foamy drinks and peppermint candies seldom got over it. I was disappointed that the alcoholics I talked with were sometimes shunned by their churches. While some churches were tossing these folks out of their congregations, Alcoholics Anonymous was taking them in, praying with them, giving them hope.

            The kind of eminent domain MSA invokes is a seizure of a patient’s property one piece at a time. It seizes the brain, then uses it to break up the rhythm of walking. It extends its domain into the swallowing apparatus, sometimes like waterboarding the patient, sometimes fiddling with the vocal cords. Then it grabs the control tower and trips its victims, causing falls. MSA applies eminent domain wherever it chooses, from aches at the top of the head to twitches at the end of the big toe.

            MSA pokes around in the brain, but most of its damage is physical. Patients tend to keep their identity intact, to avoid or defer dementia. G. K. Chesterton, a friend of George Bernard Shaw and wiser, said this a long time ago: "The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.”

            There’s talk about recognizing Chesterton, a convert to the Catholic Church, as a saint. This is astonishing, not because Chesterton is being considered for sainthood, but that a journalist is being considered.

            The fictional crime-solving Father Brown entertains on television, which had not been invented when Chesterton wrote the stories. The saint-makers know who wrote the Father Brown books, even as they argue about authorship of ancient books, how much of them is fact, how much fiction, how much the words of a journalist who liked to write mysteries.

            Old merges with new. Families probe the Internet for information about ancestors they never knew they had. One generation births babies, and adopts them. Another generation sits babies. Tom Brokaw called people of the World War II era the Greatest Generation. We who arrived between 1925 and 1942 comprise the Silent Generation. A demographer at the Census Bureau said that the “oldest old” are 85 or older, while more Americans than ever are in their 90s.

            Some folks get agitated as they move upward in the generation scale. They worry about old age because, of course, they haven’t been there before, and don’t know exactly what to expect beyond the menu of personal disasters laid out on TV screens. Some worry about a future in Hell, even though there’s no evidence anybody has ever been in a hell that has a capital h.

            Others may see old age as the normal living of life, and see life as a largely unknown adventure, maybe like a first trip to Hawaii, London or Melbourne, Australia. You know what they say about that: Bon voyage.

             

             

When mind and brain get together

          Life began at 40 when I was in typing class. The goal was to finger a 40-words-a-minute rhythm, the minimum needed to pass the first semester. Years later I sat in front of my rugged Underwood, pounding out the succession of short takes expected from a reporter at the rewrite desk.

          Typing may have been the most useful class I took in public school. It was useful in English, history, journalism and drama classes, especially in doing homework, and it raised me from the fast index finger category to touch typing. I could look at my notes, and didn’t have to look at the keyboard. Thirteen was my lucky year.

          It was many years before multiple system atrophy started a different rhythm in those fingers. MSA lives and works in the brain, where it can twitch a finger away from an intended key, or turn feet loose to slide off a sidewalk or trip on the invisible. This is the same MSA that short circuits the brain’s wiring system and routes lots of thoughts to a dead letter orifice.

          Many of us who’ve been diagnosed with MSA, or who are caregivers, trade information with each other via email. This morning I began writing an email to a friend: I love BBC's offerings during the late night via Chicago's public broadcast station. They make…

          What? What do they make? The word was suddenly misty, but I wrote down the first word that came to mind. Anchovy. It couldn’t be anchovy. It didn’t make sense. Another word popped up, amnesia. No, not amnesia. I worked at it, thinking about it, and that’s when the notion of “sleepless” came to mind. So I looked up sleepless in my Merriam-Webster and there it was: insomnia. I’d been trying to write this: I love BBC's offerings during the late night via Chicago's public broadcast station. They make insomnia almost desirable.

          You don’t need a brain disease for that. Anybody can forget a word now and then. MSA folks just do it more often, shooting mental blanks at a vanishing target.

          Nor do you need a brain warp to believe that there’s a reason for such things as MSA, beginning with the acquiescence of the Eternal,  James Moffatt’s favored name for God in his translation of the Bible. Maybe you prefer God, or Divine Mind or even Higher Power or something else that evokes the creative energy of loving, unseen parents. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to name God. Some never speak the holy name.

          No matter how deserved a punishment might be, sickness is not a punishment. If people were born so they can be tormented, with agents counterfeiting the ID of angels and a favored saint standing guard at the pearly gates of Guantanamo, the creator would need prayers for healing. We trust that human intelligence will lead to cures for MSA and other incurable diseases of this century, just as other cures have been celebrated in the past. The miracles come after mind and brain get together.  

           

The man who came to breakfast, lunch and dinner

              I checked out the boarding area for my flight from Paris to Strasbourg. I found the right gate, but there was no plane in sight. Then I spotted a tiny commuter plane underneath the boarding gate. It was a long time ago when tight security meant that nobody was allowed on board while carrying a burning cigarette. Keeping your shoes on was de rigueur, even in Paris, in the 1960s.

              I had just started to use my grandpa’s walking stick for balance because stairways and aisles began going one way while my feet went another. I didn’t have any idea that this new lurching was the calling card of a neurological disorder that’s now called MSA, multiple system atrophy.

              In those times of jolly travel nobody challenged my walking sticks, including one with a lead weight embedded inside its head. When it revealed itself on a scanner, security folks heard my explanation and shooed me on.

              It wasn’t the lead-headed walking stick that got me in trouble in Strasbourg. It was my careless wave to a uniformed fellow to help me get my luggage to a taxi. It was careless because the uniform was not, as I thought, being worn by a skycap. It was worn by a customs inspector who showed me how dutifully a visitor’s bags can be examined, one thing after another. The inspector was not a cousin, and he saw in me the family attributes a Hatfield spots in McCoys.

              My grandpa’s walking stick was a gift to him from my dad, and both would have laughed at my French faux pas. Family members are quick to laugh when a cousin qualifies for America’s Funniest Home Videos, and just as quick to reach out with helping hands when help is needed.

              More than a year ago my daughter and son-in-law, Marie and Mark Veldman, invited me to move in with them. My MSA symptoms were showing off, I was living alone and my 90th birthday was coming up. The invitation was dandy for me, but absorbing the closest, most talented, most loving, most healthy and most agreeable relative into the home of a married couple with children is not without jangled moments. Marie and Mark were not, as you know, dealing with the closest, most talented, most loving, most healthy and most agreeable person. But all those adjectives apply to them; they have made my time with them a happy rehearsal for what the Eternal has in store.

              They do my shopping, fix my meals, handle my errands, make sure that my clothes are clean, mail my letters and do just about everything that gets done for me here in this house. They’ve already done such things for their five children, Dan, Kristen, Michael, Matt and Katie. The things they do as physicians for countless patients impact the lives of people and families, too.

              Over on the California coast my son John and his wife, Pam Heyda, are a kind of golden gate to me. Up near Seattle my son David and his wife, Toni, and their son Jacob, are rocks of reassurance. I wish everyone were as lucky as I am. I probably don’t have to tell you that I love them all, even third cousins and beyond. They are why MSA doesn’t matter.