Musings

The New Social Worker's book club had picked their next book, Still Alice . The name immediately caught my attention because one of the most fascinating books I've ever read was Go Ask Alice , the anonymous diary of a teenage girl who died of a drug overdose in the 1960s. I received a message that the  Still Alice , however, is not about drug abuse or a teenage girl. Still Alice is the fictional story of Alice Howland, a 50 y.o. Harvard professor of Psychology who is diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease. While I'm sure most people know a little something about Alzheimer's, my guess is that very few are aware of the early onset variety. One of the most striking scenes in the book is when Alice goes for a run in the afternoon. At the end of her run on her way back home, Alice gets stuck at Harvard Square. Keep in mind that she's taught at the school for some twenty years and yet, she still doesn't know which way is home. Later in the book

As much as I would like to be a glass half full kind of person, I seem to always end up on the half empty side. I sometimes am this way with others, and am certainly this way with myself. I like to tell myself that I'm not being negative...that I'm just being "real" and "telling it like it is."  I think there are times when this is certainly true and believe we all need to hear "truth" at various moments in our lives. I also tend to be annoyed with those who seem to be positive and happy all the time. I mean, c'mon... haven't they ever had a bad day? In any case, the words below are my encouragement to be more positive.  I will try to catch myself being negative, and if I fail, if the thoughts make it all the way through my mind, then I will read the tips below to knock them right out of my head.  If, like me, you struggle to keep your glass half full, then I hope these words will also help you! Excerpt below taken from the Au

My pink shoes... were what I would now call "slip-ons" ---flat soles, no laces or buckles, a bit like ballet shoes.  The front of each one was ornamented with an artificial flower, a darker pink than the body of the shoe.  When I was six, those shoes expressed more about the world in which I wanted to live than anything I could possibly have put into words.  In a strange way, those pink shoes and my appetite for the places I might go in them led me, after many twists and turns, to a cell in Evin Prison. - p. 13 The depth of our grieving has to do with the importance of love in our culture.  This may sound very strange to Westerners who have been encouraged to adopt a cartoon-version of Iranians---suicide bombers, warmongers, religious zealots.  But love is the more important thing to grasp when you study Iranians. - p. 29 Iranians fall in love in exactly the same was as everyone else in the world. Muslims fall in love in the same way as everyone else in the wor

And I, separated from him by the width of a single bed and almost forty years, had no choice but to breathe in as much of his grief as I could stand and to store the rest for a rainy day. - p. 14 He had assured my mother that baby Kirsten's apparent inhabitation by wolves was more accurately described as "croup" and would be gone within three days. -p. 16 He had put a stitch in my chin after a collision with a renegade swing.- p. 16 If you destroy the Taj Mahal of blouses, and she asks you how you could be so stupid, where is the answer?  You really do not know how you could be so stupid.  You are partway through a master's degree.  You tutor bright, young, first-year students.  If only you could answer.  But you cannot think, so sleep-deprived are you, having not slept sine before the Ice Age because the rhythm section of a tiny reggae band has sublet the space between your lover's Eustachian tubes and her throat so that it can rehears