Nice and cool this morning. I need to find a sweater. Yesterday when we went for our walk, I wore a sweater. I took Ray to work and ran some errands and went to UUFA for a lunch speaker. The new Village (for older people) is going to start November 1 officially. For $250, if you're over 50, you can be a member of a network that helps people do things so they can live at home. Volunteers and discounted services are thoroughly screened and rated, for painting your house, transportation, housekeeping, and anything you might not be able to do. The director is a young woman named Kate. She was not able to come because she had a conflict, which is a little disconcerting, since we had been scheduled for months. The board member who came didn't do a great presentation, in my opinion. My Dad came and enjoyed talking to her, though, not about the subject. He had been to the school to mentor and they were on a field trip, always disconcerting.

I went to Earth Fare and Ray and I came home. I did a little class work before heading out again for class. A woman with early onset Alzheimer's spoke to us about it. She was diagnosed at 45; she couldn't work any more and told us all the things that were hard for her. Fascinating and distressing. She can't read books (or listent to them) or watch movies or TV because she forgets what happened earlier. She still goes grocery shopping, but she has to do it before 10 in the morning and if anyone interrupts her, she has to go home. She can't have a chat with a friend in the store. Noise and crowds bother her, and routine is important; changes upset her.

At the end of class, we watched a movie a woman had made about her mother after she got Alzheimer's. I cried and cried. We had to write our reaction. The most important thing to me was that, once the daughter realized she did not need to correct her mother, they were both much happier. She would forget in a minute anyway. She tended to perseverate on things--she showed up at the dentist's office every morning for a while. She called her daughter every few minutes to ask about her hearing aids, which were being repaired. She bought a lot of Lorna Doone's. She didn't remember who the daughter was, thought they were classmates in college or neighbors and of course it was really hard for the daughter. But the Mom was perfectly happy. In fact, after she moved to an institution and no longer had anything left of her life, she seemed very happy. They were allowed to live in the moment and they did. It was frustrating to her to have things that she knew should mean something to her, but they didn't, so she was much better off not living in her apartment. And she needed people around her.

Then I went to a KR board meeting, which was not what I wanted to do at that point, but it went pretty well.