Dementia Defended

One of the early signs of dementia includes having to hunt for your own Easter eggs which you laid the day before. Then, yesterday, I performed the possible sin of repeating the same blog I  previously had written; different words, but the same context, and then failed to recognize it until too late, once published. I did that very thing last night with "The Surgical Scrub" and an earlier post called " Dirty Fingernails". One might think that it's easy to avoid duplication but the ageing brain often has a short term memory deficit and also, a less brisk collection of Betz cells with fewer stories, stored, to analogize about. I remember talking to my mother in the nursing home one day when she was ninety and it became apparent that she wasn't sure who I was. Then I said to her, "Mum, do you know who I am?"  She chuckled and said, "Your face looks familiar." Then she said, "If you want to know who you are, you can go ask the nurse!" I don't need to ask the nurse or anyone else who I am. Self knowledge is the greatest thing we can achieve in life. Mum provided me with the love that allowed me to love myself and enter the region of forgetfulness without fear of failure or the risk of exposure. If I write about the same thing again, I don't give a damn. That's just me! I have listened to the same old jokes and stories from the same people I admire, told many times to the same other people for years. It's like fine old wine, or a story, gilded, not tarnished, with the patina of long life. Why should oral always trump written, even though oral gets away with it because there is no record of repetition? For some inexplicable reason a subject might bear repeating simply for the thrill of inadvertently revisiting one's creation and savouring it again, tasting your old Easter eggs anew.