Peter shows Doña Quixote two images and now she’s singing the blues

Featured image: In 2019, Joel Shapiro’s sculpture Blue was installed outside the Kennedy Center as a joyful and welcoming feature for a new extension of D.C.’s major national performing arts venue. “Shapiro’s monumental aluminum sculpture is about to run, to leap, or to kick an illusory soccer ball across the wide Potomac to Robert E. Lee’s estate on the Virginia hilltop above Arlington National Cemetery.” Shapiro died last year (2025) at the age of 83.  Yesterday, September 2, 2026, the National Park Service deinstalled the iconic 24-foot-tall figure by the fiat of President Trump. Before dawn, crews began wrapping, disassembling, and moving Blue. Critics call Blue‘s removal an example of “Trump’s continued vandalism of the nation’s artistic treasures.”

For a change, this post is NOT about my back recovery, or my difficulty swallowing that leads to coughing, or having mounds of wax scraped from my ear canals and the tunnels flushed with saline until they bled. I’m also not writing about my happy days that come in clumps and during which I really enjoy being retired and hanging out with Peter. Okay, you guessed it, I will talk about my blue periods. I’ve been bitten by the blue dog so many times, I’m on guard  even when things go well.  In the back of my mind I’m still aware that Doña Quixote is lurking nearby, readying her next malicious booby trap.

Dementia Symptoms: you name ’em, I got ’em.

I wasn’t wrong to be suspicious of the Doña. Out of the blue, she pulled the plug on my sabbatical as a “normal dementer.” She sledgehammered my brain with overlapping neuropsychiatric- and mood disturbances typical of my vascular dementia: apathy, passivity, anxiety, and depression. In the mornings, I feel that I cannot get out of bed. Only my unquenchable appetite makes me get up. (Nonstop eating is one of the short-lived pacifiers for my depression.) Once I’m fortified with breakfast, I turn to tasks that I have to complete: am I after forced motivation? Dante’s blanket is less than a year from being done. The two older grandkids have had theirs for years. I knit one or two rows, I keep dropping stitches. Every time I pick up a drop, there’s a different number of loops on my needles. Okay, time to read. I sit down with my book, but by the second paragraph the letters drift off the page and I off to sleep. I watch a movie. It’s so bad I’d switch it off if only I had the energy to look for the remote.

Silent Shout, Eva Charkiewitz. “I became interested in photography after being diagnosed with clinical depression. All the negative emotions that were in me and still are (depression likes to come back), I show in my photographs.” Note the blur of movement in Charkiewitz photo.

Underneath my dulled being, desire still stirs. Or maybe it’s just the memory of the pleasure of fulfilling a desire. I yearn for the states of flow that I used to be able to drift into in mere moments while enthusiastically pursuing a goal: Working out an interesting way to adapt a piece of clothing to my style quirks. But nothing in my closet needs fixing. Writing has worked in the past. I don’t have a writing project-in-progress to take up and, at the same time, I don’t have the wherewithal to start a new piece. There is nothing as judgmental as a screen blinking blankly as it remains pristine. Newsletter? I have no news to report nor any eye-opening insight to divulge. Against all logic, I hunger to make my mark somewhere, to be someone, to do something again. I’m useless—but also bored…

 1,) Giacomo Balla‘s Dynamism Of A Dog On A Leash, (oil painting), shows a small dachshund and the skirted feet of its walking human. Repeating lines and blurred shapes capture speed, time, and motion on a single canvas: dozens of legs and tails overlap, the curved sweeping leash looks like a sound wave. The human’s dark shoes and long skirts are chopped into multiple steps, showing a quick, rhythmic walking pace. These features reflect the Futurist idea that a moving object does not just have one position, but many at once.

2,) Charles Burton Barber‘s (oil portrait), Minna, is named for the eponymous  Skye terrier puppy (1873), that was born to Corran and Ferrisch, two of Queen Victoria’s favorite terriers. Balla‘s and Barber‘s works are in the relation {“motion” and “stilness“}. Leading experts believe that Minna died in February 1873, leading them to conclude that the portrait was likely painted posthumously at the kennels in Windsor Castle. This incidental fact leads me to the word pair {“life” and “death” }, an ironic analogy for {“motion” and “stilness“}.

Peter’s suggestion indeed rekindled my creative interest—aren’t these few paragraphs evidence of it? But I don’t know that there’s a point in this piece. My life feels pointless.

Quoth Doña Quixote: Why must everything have a point?

A very wise fellow-dementer, the late Wendy Mitchell, demonstrated that you can pluck a point from the wind with a handkerchief. Literally. She would set out on a morning “trundle” even when the English weather included wind, rain, and/or mud. She walked and re-walked the fells and lakes that surround her picturesque village in east Yorkshire—except on the days she was riddled with apathy: “I curl up under my duvet and hide away from the world.” On good days, she photographed ducks, robins, dogs, lakes, puddles—and especially sunrises—for her blog Which me am I today. Her blog was my lifeline for understanding that even when things get very difficult, there’s stiil joy to be found in the world. She’d post her photos chronologically and write one or two sentences beneath each one. Her “point” was, “I am still here and the world is spectacular.”

Wendy, center, died two-and-a-half years ago by stopping eating and drinking. The photo shows her on a “wheely trundle” just before she implemented her plan to die. In a letter published by her daughters (they’re with her in the photo above) after her death, she wrote, “My last cuppa tea—my final hug in a mug—the hardest thing to let go of….Adapting to this life with dementia is over, but I don’t consider dementia has won….It’s ME calling time on MY dementia—checkmate, before it plays its final move.”

As for the point of this “blues” post, it really doesn’t have one. However, in my mind this writing does have something loosely tying the parts together. This understanding came to me gradually while I was perambulating the Internet’s soggy quagmires of information and muddy abysses of “truth”: instead of one point, this post consists of many paragraph-sized dots, the kind one joins with a line in a connecting-the-dots game. To force/forge a metaphor, the dots represent my tottering steps as I try to navigate the bewildering world. Some therapists believe that  connect-the numbered-dots games relieves anxiety.

Given that I have failed the connect-the-dots part of my neuropsychological dementia test the last 2 times I went, the mere act of  looking for the number 1 stressed me out. St Peter helped me find it and marked it with a red dot. However, when Peter pointed out that the dots go to  number 514, I declared a ceasefire. This “stress-relieving” exercise would steal more of Peter’s time and draw enough battle energy from me to run an AI data center. But I’m curious: what will the star-studded puzzle reveal? Thanks to  Peter’s expertise in all things AI, I’ve lately learned that a task such as completing the game can be done via Artificial Intelligence. Although I am fiercely opposed to the damage AI is doing to children’s thinking and also shudder at its inordinate need for energy, I quickly abandon my principles and hand the task over to Google. I put the puzzle image in the search space and asked the system to “indicate important patterns.”

I whooped with delight  when I noted my favorite constellation on the left above: Orion. I learned about the constellations from my father when I was a child on the farm. We’d both lie on our backs on the dry grass while my father pointed out the Southern Cross, Gemini with the twins Castor and Pollux, and the three stars of Orion’s belt.  The mighty hunter stands on his head, its legs kick upwards to a point over our heads, his sword between them looking like a penis. I stifle my giggle, purse my lips so that I would not blurt out my thought in my father’s presence. Now I know he would have found my sauciness funny. Then and now. Painful nostalgia.

Tucker Nichols

In the same way that I didn’t know how to start this post, I don’t know how to end it. I first thought that upside-down Blue would be the end. But no. Quoth Doña Quixote: “Why stop when things the situation feels hopeless again? That’s where hope is needed most.” Says a bestseller author who’s made it big on BookTok, every story has four parts: the beginning, the middle, the almost-ending, and the true ending.” Quoth Doña Quixote: “Only those who persevere can find their true ending.” I consult my live-in perseverance coach and show him some images that I’d recently stumbled upon. He puts them side by side: they vibrate with possibility. Out comes his image editing tools. When he was done, I knew I had my true ending.

The overachiever’s ending:

Song sung blue, weeping like a willow

Song sung blue, sleeping on my pillow

Funny thing

But you can sing it with a cry in your voice

And before you know it get to feeling good

You simply got no choice