Losing my arithmetic skills is driving me nuts. I calculate things in my head, then when I use a calculator later I discover that my calculations were completely wrong. You’d me amazed at how often we make calculations in our heads, even rough calculations, and you don’t notice it until you discover that your ability to do so is badly flawed. Suddenly the running tallies I keep in my head are nowhere near accurate. We live in an arithmetical world, adding and subtracting all the time. I can’t do it well. My wife can’t do it at all. Money runs out when I didn’t think it would run out, checks bounce that I swore had sufficient funds. It’s a creepy feeling. Basic human skills, the things that make people people and not chimpanzees, and once made us homo sapiens and not homo neanderthals, they’re slipping away in a mental mist.

Combine that with falling off the calendar, days just running one after another without months or weeks or years, and I’m having severe doubts about our ability to run our own affairs. If it were only one of us it wouldn’t be an issue. But we won the big wazoo, both husband and wife with the same brain damage but from entirely different causes. What are the odds, an old boss of mine used to say, what are the odds. Then he went nuts, stark raving bonkers, and they had to let him go. Brains are fragile, funny things. Think I’ll go hide myself in a book and worry about all this tomorrow.