Gerda re-cognizes her childhood “what shall I be’s” in light of Doña Quixote’s old age Que Será, Serás

Featured image: Child Gerda—9 years old, Grade VI, in photo—imagines what she shall be when she grows up. Thanks to Peter for manipulating this photo and several illustrations (artists not known) as background to the photo, as well as creating the other manipulated images.

“Que será, será
 Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que será, será
What will be, will be”

When would-be child prodigy pianist Leon Fleisher was 4 years old, his older brother Ray started taking piano lessons. When the lesson was over, Leon would take Ray’s place at the piano and play back what he’d heard. Their parents were immigrants, his father from Ukraine, his mother from Poland. Money was scarce. His mother said to Leon that if he, too, wanted lessons, “Either I was to be the first Jewish President of the United States or a great concert pianist.”

Leon Fleisher at age 9

In a Hidden Brain podcast, science journalist Shankar Vedantam tells Leon Fleisher’s story. From being a brilliant musician from age 4, Fleisher broke into public consciousness when, at age 16 first, he first performed at  Carnegie Hall. From there, he organically transitioned to a successful concert pianist career. At the age of 36, though, he lost the use of his right hand due a neurological condition that causes the fingers to curl into the palm. In My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music, he writes, “When the gods want to get to you, they know right where to strike, the place that will hurt the most.” His career was in jeopardy, his second marriage was in tatters, he was financially stressed, he considered suicide. He sank into “a deep funk, a deep depression, yes, yes.”

In the context of Fleisher’s hardship, Vedantam is pleased to announce that after two miserable years, with the help of his friends and students, the pianist was able to answer the “cry of [his] soul for growth. Fleisher says,”I became aware that my connection, my relationship, was with music, more than with the instrument. If there was a way that I could remain active in music without playing with two hands, well, I had to find it.” Accordingly, he focused on teaching and conducting, as well as researching, practicing, and performing the unexpectedly bountiful repertoire composed for left hand alone. Vedantam perceives Fleisher’s method as a precursor of a technique taught in cognitive psychology for managing negative emotions related to a major setback in our lives—whether “worse than” or “not as bad” as the pianist’s. The technique is known as “re–cognition” and consists of changing the story you tell yourself about a situation to change how you feel about it. By changing the doom-laden unconscious patterns in our minds, we build diverging brain pathways that create distance between ourselves and the destructive emotions we had nursed  in the past. Leon Fleisher reframed his story by concluding, “It’s not the instrument but the music that matters.” As a result  he developed a “gruffly Zen equanimity” about “my little tragedy, which had been positively Greek in its scope.”

Many other people—in a way similar to Fleisher’—identified their life path early and eventually became famous. Would-be Nobel Prize  winner Malala Yousafzai, for example, started speaking publicly about girls’ education when she was just 11 years old. When I was a child, my “what shall I be’s” were not nearly as specific as Fleisher’s and Yousafzai’s clearly were. However, during an early life event, I experienced a burning passion for a field of study, though I did not for a while know its name. When I was between ages 4 and 5, we moved from a suburb of Cape Town to the family farm in the then Transvaal in South Africa. For the first time I experienced the full glory of the night sky: my father and I on our backs on the grass, his cigarette glowing red in his writing hand, my head cushioned on his upper arm on the other side. Above, the stars so close my hand went up by itself to touch them. “The moon!” I say. “When it looks like that it’s called a crescent” my father says. “The bright star near it is the planet Venus.” I say, “It’s going to crash into the moon!” “No,” my father says. “They’re actually millions of miles apart. Now look straight up. See the stripe of light that looks if it has clouds over it? That’s the Milky Way.” I am hooked. I don’t want to go to bed. Before I fall asleep, I formulate my very first career goal, though I did not think of it as such at the time. I JUST WANTED TO KNOW EVERYTHING about the night sky. A night or two later, my father said that a person who knows everything about the stars is called a sterrekundige. That’s what I shall be. Via my mother reading English books to me and my siblings at bedtime, translating sentence by sentence, I would later learn the English word for it: “astronomer.”

Above, The history of my “what shall I be’s” from about age 5 up to the time I finished Matric (graduated high school) at sixteen.

After a long writing-dispossessed gap of 3+ months since my previous post, my idea for this piece came from conversations Peter and I are increasingly having about childhood- and other memories of which we are by now the only living bearers. The other day we recalled a cowboy outfit that Peter had worn as a child. Having been a suburban boy in Pretoria, unlike my farm-girl-growing-up, Peter had encountered some contemporary culture at the Saturday morning movies, at the end of  which he and the other kids traded comics. He got imprinted with the Hollywood version of the Wild West. The comic books added detail and vocabulary. His enthusiasm about cowboys was such that his mother, Raaitjie, had inveigled a friend of hers to send a cowboy suit from America when Peter was about 5. It was a beautiful ensemble: a green and yellow shirt, pants with fringes, a belt with holsters, and leather boots. After he had outgrown the pants and boots, Peter still wore the shirt with his jeans until he was about 1o or 11. When I got to know him, all that was left of his pièce de résistance was the boots, which he passed onto our children and grandchildren in turn. Playing “Cowboys and Crooks” was one of his favorite neighborhood games. I ask if he would have written “cowboy” on a list such as in the diagram shown above. His “no” was not a surprise, we both laughed. He said that while he and his neighbor kids were shooting up the crooks, he did have fleeting feelings about how great it would be to become a genuine cowboy. However, even at the time of the thought, he knew it was a fantasy. Like me, he’d been indoctrinated early on that he would be heading for a university education.

Left, I asked Peter to make a photo of himself as a cowboy: he inserted his own face at age 8 in that of cowboy Rocky Lane. He sits on Rocky’s stallion, Black Jack. The cowboy illustration is from the front page of a comic book The Trouble Trail, Jan 10, 1950.  Right, Dante—about 4—wears Peter’s cowboy boots.

Peter and I also talked about our parents’ childhood dreams. Both of Peter’s parents very much wanted to but had not been financially able to attain a post-secondary education. His father, Dudley, was unable to complete high school, but had to find a job after 10th grade. His mother, Raaitjie ,graduated high school. She’d have loved to study home economics, now known as family and consumer studies. After highschool, she worked at secretarial jobs until Peter’s older brother Cliff was born. Then she became an at-home parent, also taking care of her wheelchair-bound grandmother who had raised her. Upon leaving high school, Dudley had entered an apprenticeship in the South African Railways‘ (SAR‘s) woodworking program. He’d very much wanted to become a woodwork teacher, but that, too, was in the end not feasible. Dudley was emphatic that his sons were not ever to work at SAR. The woodworking shop was bad for your lungs. He nevertheless enjoyed his coworkers and their practical jokes and loyalty. He helped build those beautiful wood passenger cars like those seen in movies like Murder on the Orient Express. Money was scarce. Dudley took up woodwork commissions outside of work hours. His exceptional talent was recognized by SAR: they chose him as the master craftsman to make the wood parts of  7 (8?) coin-operated model locomotives, a coal car, and so on, to make up a 4ft long train that would be displayed in the major SouthAfrican stations. Both Peter and I, from our separate childhoods, have sentimental memories of feeding a coin into the train at Pretoria Station to get the train chugging. In this way, Dudley became a small part of the South African Railways’ history, but he would never know that one of his trains with would be posted on the internet 65 years after he made them.

None of Dudley’s model trains are currently displayed at stations. However a model train enthusiast restored one of them and got it working. Both Peter and I remember that the driver at one point waved from the cab. A whistle also sounded sometime during the ride.

As for Peter’s parents’ dreams that he become a teacher, they were fulfilled. In an ironic twist, though—when Peter was only 1 semester into teaching math at Clapham High School—Dudley made the startling announcement that there was a job at the Railways that he thought Peter would love: in SAR’s newly acquired one of the computer systems then coming into use in South Africa. With a semester’s worth of the programming language Fortran under his belt, and the phone number of Gert van de Veer (who would be his boss for many years), Peter went after the job. It was the first step of his lifelong vocation/career in Information Technology and Network Design. His first job was on a freight-system known as Transnet, one of the few early transportation networks in the world. By the time the system was fully in use, Peter left the Railways to start his own business. Just about then, the Railways and airlines were combined into  the South African Transport Services (SATS). They promptly hired Peter as a consultant. Transnet is still in use in South Africa today, functioning as state monopoly. Just last  week (August 23, 2025), the government announced they have started opening it up to private firms.

Before moving off the topic of Peter’s career, I add this paragraph about what I wish my beloved father-in-law Dudley could have known before he died. Before his death, he was immensely proud that Peter’s speedily acquired knowledge was spreading from SAR to other countries: his son had became enough of an expert in networking to be invited to meetings of ISO, the International Standards Organization. Dudley would live for only eight more years after he had pointed Peter toward SAR. He would die of emphysema at age 61, before he had even retired. I wish he’d lived to see Peter’s career expanding further: in various countries, in various working over many years, Peter  worked elbow to elbow with “the father of the Internet,” Vint Cerf, and other early internet pioneers by participating in the definition of  protocols that would became industry standards and that still shape computer communications today. His first patent was registered soon after we immigrated to the US. It was followed by over 100 others, all registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office . This year, 2025, he is listed in World’s Best Computer Scientists. Both Dudley and Raaitjie would have been intensely excited that Peter, too, found a little spot in history. Like Peter and me, they would KNOW that his  gradual post-teacher re-fashioning of their and his childhood wannabe is nothing less than mind-blowing.

In Peter’s study, plaques showing a few of his 100+ patents

Mindblowing: the mere writing of this rubric gives me the lamest excuse ever for a writing transition: it inspires me to give an update of Leon Fleisher story. Wile the musician’s place in music history was already ensured by his childhood prodigality, conducting, teaching, and in his career of one-handed playing, his must be reframed as a result of one of the greatest comeback stories in classical music. By the time he was 77, his hand disorder was finally diagnosed as focal dystonia and treated with Botox and deep-tissue massage. Two years later—at the turn of the millennium—he was able to uncurl his fingers and again play two-handed. Worldwide, he performed pieces for two hands and one hand, sometimes with Katherine Jacobson Fleisher, his wife of then 28 years.  Now comes the best part: When asked if he would have felt himself a failure if he did not have a successful comeback, he said, “No, no, no, no. I mean, if I can, I will play. If I can’t, I won’t.” His brain pathways had irretrievably veered 180° from “Greek tragedy” to the Bodhidharma bliss of seeking nothing. “You know,” he added, “there is an enormous amount of  [left-hand] repertoire that I have not done that I have yet to look forward to. It will keep me off the streets.”

Image from Book of Tau website. Photographer not known.

I was very lucky that my childhood “what shall I be’s” played out close enough to more than satisfy me. Even with my dementia diagnosis, I feel that my overall life turned out far better than I had dreamed it would. The naming of my cognitive difficulties, in fact, came as a great relief. I JUST WANTED TO KNOW. When I learned about my cognitive disfunction, I knew Fleisher was right: “When the gods want to get to you, they know right where to strike, the place that will hurt the most.” Of course I had to radically re-cognize my identity in the story of what followed my diagnosis: my Self had to change from being “the brainy one” to that of a person struggling daily to just live her life. However, my dementia diagnosis also brought me the opportunity be an ally of my fellow dementors by writing Memory’s Last Breath: Field Notes on my Dementia, consenting to  PBS filming me to make The Gerda that Remains, speaking at conferences both in Utah and in several other states. Now, though, my dementia is far worse than in my advocacy days. Writing or traveling as in the early days have become impossible. Where and how I live have become small. My deficits are far more noticeable. As I told Peter some months ago, “I now have dementia in public. I am the old woman holding up the queue by not remembering her phone number, fails to get her phone to work, almost trips her fellow mall-walkers, needs almost constant help with everything in our flat, especially in the kitchen.” I mostly laugh about my accumulating misfirings and Peter laughs with me. We laugh just as much about his afflictions of old age. We also laughed a lot when he helped me with the images on this post of re-cognizing my list of wanna’be’s and don’t-wannabe‘s.

While I am tempted to end this post on the previous paragraph about Peter and me laughing—because the internet says blog readers want an upbeat ending—I am not taking the people-pleasing way out. I want to tell you about a difficult issue in my and Peter’s life with which I wrestle every day: when to take my own life before I become Doña Quixote in toto. I am so afraid I’m going to miss the point at which I can achieve my death completely by myself. I do not want to jeopardize Peter and/or my other family members. The problem is that I (and Peter) keep re-cognizing my life, our precious togetherness. Whenever one additional thing goes wrong, Peter is very convincing about saying “You know I love to help you.” I know he does, I believe him. I also know that no matter how he has supported me both emotionally and practically in my decision to carry out my death, that it has been immensely difficult for him. Every time that I add one more functional or cognitive deficit to my daily life, he and I do laugh, but we also discuss my exit plans. What is the point in time when do you stop re-cognizing your life as things get worse?

Photographer and art therapist Jennifer Blau. From A Portrait of Dementia: Patricia’s Room

Even as one awaits one of the largest griefs one can imagine—the death of one of  the people you love most dearly—we keep on re-cognizing. In a superbly written novel I am reading,  A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, a law professor and his wife, a scientist, discover that their only child, a boy who had just turned four, was suffering from an extremely rare neurodegenerative disease that was resulting in the failure of his eyesight, his speech, and all the other faculties by which they had come to know and love him. His father says, “The hardest thing of being a  parent is the recalibration.” But re-calibrate they did. Liesl: “Here are great schools we can send him to.” Harold: “May he cannot go to school at all, but he could be in a play group.”As a their son’s abilities faded, they kept taking turns to shift down. “Okay, maybe he wouldn’t be able to go to a playgroup, but maybe he would live a long life anyway.” “Okay, maybe he wouldn’t live a long life, but maybe he can live a short happy life. “Okay, he couldn’t live a short happy life, but maybe he could live a short life with dignity. We could give him that.”

I leave you a film that deeply moved me, while also reinforcing my conviction that we humans, if we’re lucky, can overcome the pain of grief and manage to live on, even with joy: Watch Motoi Yamamoto’s art documentary by clicking the title Return to the Sea: Saltworks or clicking the image below: