Senility

I used to wonder if I’d get senile when I got old. Yes, I am.

My grandmother was pretty far gone by the time she died in 1968. She was born the spring before the Battle of the Little Big Horn and was old and mean by the time I met her. At the end she didn’t know who anybody was, and she smiled most of the time. Senility became her.

My mother was in her early 80s when Mrs. Belcher, who lived across the street from my mother, wrote to me. Belcher was trying to tell me that my mother was slipping mentally, but she didn’t have much luck because she was slipping, too.

Six months later, my mother moved in with my family in Minneapolis. In less than three years she was dead of Alzheimer’s. My mother’s Alzheimer’s looked like my grandmother’s senility, only with drugs. I don’t think I’d like to have a disease named after me. Maybe a park.

My mother’s brothers went gaga before they checked out, she told me with satisfaction, and senility was starting to look to me like something that runs in the family. Oh, well.

Now it seems people all over talk about experiencing “senior moments” or “brain farts.” Is this a new phenomenon?

I’ve read that a lot of people had lead poisoning in the Roman Empire because of ubiquitous lead-lined containers. That’s the problem with everybody doing the same thing—everybody gets it at the same time.

What are we doing now that will seem goofy in a few hundred years?

It could be anything, one of the thousands of new compounds that are invented every year and put into or onto the stuff we buy and eat and breathe in and smear on ourselves.

We’ve known for years that flashing lights affect our brains and can drive some people batty—from headaches to nausea and seizures. We know that. Still, well-meaning people advocate rapidly pulsing fluorescents for everybody, just because they’re cheaper to use than ordinary incandescent bulbs. I don’t suppose any other radiation is better, although I admit to trusting sunlight more than microwaves; at least sunlight feels good.

I’m on my way to somewhere I can’t predict anyhow, and I don’t have time to think about what I’ll seem like by the time I get there. And I don’t try to avoid all of the hazards, since I don’t really know what they might be.

So I embrace radiation. I use a microwave every day, my house is WiFied within an inch of its life, I use a wireless handset at home and a mobile phone with a Bluetooth headset everywhere else. My cells are continually abuzz with unseen stimulation, some of it originating next to my head and shooting right in there with no wasted energy. I feel great.

God only knows how various frequencies affect my mind, and I don’t think God cares, being the cause of all this to start with. Now I don’t care either. I’m along for the ride, and if I’m not making sense, too bad. Maybe I’ll run for office.