Sleep, hearing, sight

Tuesday morning, ten past nine, and a friend from the walking group had her coat on the back of her chair at the senior centre on Elm Street, her handbag open on the table, and a pair of reading glasses in her hand that she was not wearing. She said she had come for the…

Margaret came to the senior centre on Elm Street with a kitchen timer in her purse, the little white plastic kind that ticks. She set it on the table during our brown-bag review like it was one of the bottles. When I asked about it, she said her daughter had told her to get more…

The man standing at my kitchen table last March had brought his mask in a grocery bag, and he set it down the way you set down something you have already decided to return. Carl is not his name, but the bag is true, and so is what he said. He had worn the thing…

The first time I heard what an overnight sleep study cost out of pocket, I set down my pen. A hefty sum to sleep in a strange bed with wires on your chin. I have filled a lot of prescriptions in my life, and I still think that is a hard number to swallow. Why…

Most memory trouble I see is really a rhythm problem. The day stops having a spine after sixty. Work used to give it one. The children used to give it one. Then one day you look up and it is 2 in the afternoon and you have not spoken to anyone or eaten anything hot,…

The light over the kitchen table at half past seven in October has a yellow cast to it, and I eat my toast in it anyway, even though I know better by now. It is a small kitchen in a small house, and the window faces east, which means in June the morning comes in…

Marlene fell asleep in the chair while the kettle was boiling. She had come to the brown-bag table on a Thursday, the way she does, with a grocery sack of bottles and a complaint about her memory. Halfway through telling me about her sister’s birthday she was gone, chin to chest, and the kettle was…

I once told Carol her morning headaches were probably her pillow. I was wrong, and she had the grace not to say so right away. She’d been waking with a sore head most mornings for a year, and I gave her a pillow opinion over the phone from Arizona. It took her own doctor asking…

The coffee pot had just finished when Frank set his brown bag on my kitchen table last Tuesday. It was the usual mix from the senior centre on Elm Street—blood pressure pills, a statin, and a bottle of sleep aids he bought over the counter. He told me he’d been forgetting names again, and his…

Ruth, who lives two doors down from me, stood on my porch last Tuesday with a small case in her hand. She said, “I finally got them, Diane, and I hate them. Everything sounds like I’m inside a tin can.” How to keep your memory steadyThe video walks through the common cause of forgetting after…