Tag Archives: writing

Or, a son’s letter recalls an amphibian’s ignoble end.

My mother has been diagnosed with dementia, so I have been sending her letters to spark old family memories. This week I wrote to her about our family’s visit to the Calaveras County Fair & Jumping Frog Jubilee in the mid-1960s. More on that below.

Dementia takes many forms. The rehab facility wing where she’s staying features a rectangular hallway around a courtyard where shrubs and eucalyptus trees are planted. Some patients sit staring out the window wherever staffers park them. Others propel themselves in their wheelchairs with their stockinged feet, determined to keep circling, circling, hour after hour. Get out of their way or they’ll scowl at you and gibber a rebuke. During my recent visit, one poor fellow asked me whenever he circled by, “Where am I?”

The Workings in the late ’60s, several years after the Angels Camp trip.

Mom can appear mentally sound if forgetful—conversant and aware of where she is. But she often falls into confusion. At first she thought she’d been kidnapped, rather than transferred here from a hospital after a fall. She still keeps telling us that my mentally disabled brother Jeff is lost, out wandering the Mojave Desert where we lived fifty-seven years ago.