Sad News

I just received an email from my sister in California that my brother-in-law, whom I adore, has Alzheimer's. His doctor informed the Department of Motor Vehicles and they have asked my brother-in-law to come in for a driver's test.

When I was growing up Buck, my brother-in-law, was working for a defense company on some technical part of the Snark missile nose cone. I have always thought him to be one of the brightest people I've ever met. To hear that this brilliant mind is being reduced and eroded hurts.

Buck was born in a hovel along a creek bed in rural Oklahoma. He described it to me once as a dug out place along the river bank. Carter, Oklahoma. It does not make most maps. Jim and I drove around Carter, or what was left of it, one day a couple years ago. Found the elementary school; found the creek. Shook our heads at the poverty and decay that exists there even today and tried to imagine what growing up in this town without parents would be like.

It is to his credit and grit that he moved to California and finished college and became successful. An avid photographer, he built a dark room complete with rotating door in a my sister's dream home on top of a mountain in northern California.

Know what I am thinking about? I'm thinking about my few years of living in Los Angeles. I'm thinking about the erratic, maniacal drivers on the freeway and their hand gestures, speed, their darting in and out of traffic. And I am stunned to read that California has a Deparment of Motor Vehicles.