‘Coming into leaf’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
* * * *
When I entered her car last Wednesday morning, my friend’s greeting was, “What a beautiful day.” This is not always her greeting, not always the first thing I hear her say when I see her on Wednesdays, so from inside my current depression I stammered, “You … you mean the sunniness?”

We backed out into the road. It was indeed a sunny morning. “Yeah, I think we’re finally past the snow,” she added.

As you and your shovel may know, it was indeed a snowy winter this December and January and February and March in New Paltz, a prankster’s winter that gave us the biggest snowstorm in a couple years followed by a few unseasonably warm days followed by the biggest snowstorm in a decade and a week of below-zero nights. Small snowstorms then punctuated March. My friend’s tentative response (“I think we’re finally past the snow”) was the sensible one. More snow could yet arrive.

I needed that greeting, though. It was a sunny morning, and I had not yet noticed it.
Read More

‘Do People Your Age …?’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

On the eve of 57, no less.

* * * *
I’ve strolled past enough of life’s temporal landmarks—birthdays that end in zero or five, or the first time someone called me “sir,” or when I turned 28 and AARP “free gift” mailers started to arrive—that I did not think one could jump out of an alley and surprise me, but it happened. And, yes, “surprised” is a euphemism for “enraged.”

Okay, “enraged” is an exaggeration. I did NOT hit the other person, nor did I try to.

Please allow me to set the scene for you: I am 56. (This is all anyone needs to know, right?)
Read More

2024 (Covid’s Version)

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My brain was producing a redacted document, live.

* * * *
There does not need to be a term more precise for the phenomenon of brain fog than “brain fog.” Of course, one may want to quantify things, determine a precise number with a decimal point and a percentage sign to let people know that under this number one does not have brain fog, but above it … hoo boy! Above this percentage point, one should not be able to complete, you know, those things that people write. You know, sentences!

I spent most of 2024 in a case of brain fog. It relented in August, eight months after my first and so far only case of Covid. I do not know how bad a case of post-Covid brain fog I lived with this year, and medicine does not have a firm, numbers-with-a decimal-point-and-percentage mark grasp on the phenomenon at this point anyway. I still have it, a little, and I now consider brain fog to be a part of what I refer to as me, like my gray hair.

Physicians around the world started to publish papers in 2020 that describe and measure cognitive deficits patients encounter thanks to Covid; patients score lower on IQ tests while sick and also after, and some patients of a certain age (around my age: mid-to-late 50s) exhibit symptoms of early-onset dementia post-Covid. Those who have contracted Covid more than once display even more serious cognitive troubles. The library of peer-reviewed articles in medical journals about the nervous system problems experienced during and after Covid grows each day. I do not have a comprehensive list, but there are many social media accounts that compile the articles, and I can direct anyone who is curious to those. The articles are cautious, as they should be, yet all describe a condition that is still only partly understood. Millions of people who have had COVID have suffered cognitive deficits if not declines.

I do not know if I am one of those cases. I only know what I experienced this year. I only know that until August I sometimes had trouble following what people said to me and what I read, and that when I started a sentence, both in conversation and at the keyboard, it felt like an adventure to reach the end.
Read More