What Mom Read Pre-Alzheimer's

            At Aegis Mom was reading Contrary to Popular Belief—an engaging book with very short passages that she could follow from the beginning to the end of the paragraph.  We both enjoyed it and sometimes read it aloud to the other residents. 

            “Don’t you dare get it for other people!" she told me.  “This is what I’m going to give everybody on my Christmas list.”

            I thought of Deborah Kaufman’s Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, in which she says that her mother became much less of a “snob’ after she had Alzheimer’s and enjoyed such things as Ted Mac’s Amateur Hour—something she’d have dismissed with disdain in her pre-Alzheimer’s state of mind.

            Mom loved literature—serious, thoughtful, complex novels and non-fiction.  She read Agatha Christie novels, too, because she liked the atmosphere, but she was a serious reader of literary fiction.  

She was an English major, and even though she dropped out of UCLA to marry my dad and type his PhD dissertation in the early 1940s, she continued to work towards her degree in English through correspondence courses as we were growing up.  Then, when we moved to Kansas, she and I were English majors at the same college—Fort Hayes Kansas State!  We even had the same teacher for American literature.  She had him for upper division, and I had him for lower division.  I had been an inattentive student until college—more interested in listening to Broadway musicals over and over than in opening a book—except for the poetry section of our Adventures in Literature book.  But the year Mom was a senior and I was a freshman, we both made the dean’s list and got in the honor society.  I got asked out more, but she was more popular.    (I, for the first time ever, studied constantly.  She occasional socialized!) 

            But Dr. Clifford Edwards wrote very appreciative things on Mom’s papers, which were very insightful, and she kept those papers.   I didn’t keep mine, but I remember his saying the same thing to both of us about the journals he asked us to keep, connecting what we read to our lives.

            “You really reflect and connect.  Most students just summarize.”

             "Yes," Mom told me, "we love to talk about ourselves."

            My older (but younger looking) sister Dana insists that Mom read Moby Dick aloud to her every night, “whether I wanted her to or not.”  I’m not sure about this, but I do know that Moby Dick was much more representative of Mom’s pre-Alzheimer’s mind than Contrary to Popular Belief with its 250 “false facts.”