Since I was diagnosed with microvascular disease, many people have told me about one or another supplement, diet, or miracle cure purported to slow down dementia or even reverse it. On the scientific front, however, no evidence has been found “that any vitamin or mineral supplementation strategy for cognitively healthy adults in mid- or late […]
Featured art: Near Miss, Jack Davis (2017) When it comes to lost and found, I have had four major near misses in my life. All four relate to losing my handbag and/or money in public places with many strangers milling around. Clearly the kind of lapses for which I now blame Doña Quixote have been […]
At DF Dance Studio, Peter — his black shirt and pants bedecked with a red tie — walks onto the stage with his team, Fuego (Fire). His lissom dance partner, “the lady in red, she in the chile con carne red,brilliant as the shine of a pepper crimson in the summer sun,…crimson arrow amidst the […]
It’s been a while since I last posted a blog. Blame Doña Quixote. Afrikaans has a crass but apt expression when it comes to how I feel toward the Doña lately: more than once during the past months I’ve told her, “Jy maak my tiete lam,” or, “You make my tits droop.” So what has […]
Featured image: Miracle granted to Puglisi Giovanni, 1980. “Medical Miracles: Medical Imagery in Ex-Votos.” U.S. National Library of Medicine. (An ex-voto is a religious offering given in order to fulfill a vow.) “At 76, I am old enough to die.” So says Barbara Ehrenreich, author and political activist—who describes herself as “a myth buster by […]
Featured image: Atomic and Uranic Melancholic Idyll, Salvador Dalí (1945). Last week Monday, July 2, 2018, a giant saucer-shaped UFO, large enough to eclipse the waning gibbous moon over the Salt Lake Valley, entered Earth orbit and deployed a saucer-shaped “destroyer” module that settled over Wilmington Flats, obscuring even the little paradise of Hidden Hollow. As […]
Image credit: “Massacre in Korea” by Pablo Picasso, 1951 Dementia can go like this: In a blog entry over a year ago, I introduced you to Edith Buchsteiner Schmidt, whom I have never met, but with whom I have a complicated link of non-blood relationships, the fellowship of being a first-generation immigrant mother, and the bond […]
Over the 7 years of retirement since my dementia diagnosis, I have gradually realized that direct activism has become a thing of the past for me. Every now and then I get so mad, though, that I have to participate, for example, in the rally protesting the LDS church making apostates of the children of […]
The idea of the Ouroboros, or tail-eating serpent, first lodged in my mind during an organic chemistry class when I was 18 and in my second year at the University of Pretoria. By then I had already met Peter and we had moved from being “just friends” to “going steady.” We were in class together […]
I have been lucky enough to accumulate four strings of pearls in my lifetime. Last week, I lost them all. Above, wearing my first pearls on my 28th birthday in 1977, when Marissa was 6 months old. Peter gave me bunches of flowers, wrapped in newspaper those days. My first pearls were from Japan, which […]