As I was waking up Sunday morning, I found myself working on a comparison/contrast of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. I have no idea what I might have been dreaming, but it was enough to keep the thought process going even after I was fully awake.
Here’s what I came up with:
Psychology is the study of individuals and how they have been shaped through their internal chemistries, their thoughts, and their interactions with others, with the goal of helping each to optimum functioning.
Sociology is the study of people in aggregate, their society, and how the individual effects and is affected by the social system, also with the idea of improving both the aggregate and the individual functioning to an optimal level.
Anthropology is the study of other societies, remote in time, distance, or social strata. It does not seek to “improve” the society being studied (which could be construed as a type of contamination, and which it would be unable to do in historical societies, anyway), but rather to understand to the point that what worked and what didn’t work could be applied to optimize the observer’s society of origin.
Maybe the next part of this comparison/contrast would be the metaphysical, which attempts to understand the impact of forces that do not originate within the physical self or society. This might include what Jung referred to as the collective unconscious, what people of Western religion call saints, angels, God, or Holy Spirit (or Satan or demons, if that impact is negative), and what New Thought calls Spirit or Higher Self (with the belief that the negative is physically based and not external to humanity), among others.
I still have no idea why this was important enough to make the transition from sleep to wakefulness, but after thinking about it off and on all that day, I thought I’d share.
Dream Cogitation
Manifestation Madness
A few nights ago at dinner, I asked Steve for a story of recent manifestation. (I read a lot of Wayne Dyer.) He said he couldn’t think of anything specific, but in general the right things come at the right times all the time.
I said that on the way home that night, I remembered telling him a few weeks ago that I wanted to live in a house where the toilet didn’t gurgle when we did laundry. (The cut-rate plumber our landlord usually calls had assured us when it started making that noise after one of his snake-out-the-clogged-drain visits that it was making that noise because the drainage pipes were small and it was actually a good sign and that they were finally venting properly.) Shortly after my wish for a house with a non-conversational toilet, the drains in the entire house stopped up. The cut-rate plumber was not returning the landlord’s calls, so he told Steve to make whatever arrangements were necessary and send him the bill. We called James of JHRooter in Oldsmar (727-420-1941). He arrived within the hour, brought along his very nice teenaged son as a helper, made everything ALL better, and after he left, we realized that now that the drain pipes for the house had been snaked properly, the toilet no longer talks on laundry day. Hooray!
The morning after our manifesting conversation, Steve came into the office to tell me that he now had a story for me. He was totally out of his fat-free salad dressing packets that he orders on-line. He was packing his lunch, resigned to the fact that he would not be having his preferred fat-free caesar dressing on his salad that day, when the FedEx truck appeared, bringing his latest order.
And that’s how we roll at our house.
Yesterday morning, I realized that it was August 1st and the first day of camp. Woohoo!
Art by Mother
Three mornings per week, a van or car comes to our house and picks Mother up to take her to the Dunedin Day Center. They sing songs, read the paper, play Bingo (sometimes Mother brings me the packages of cookies she’s won), and lots of other activities, including breakfast, lunch, and a mid-afternoon snack before she comes back home in the afternoon.
Sometimes she brings home artwork that she’s done. Some projects are more impressive than others. Below is one of the first things she brought home and taped to the living room wall.
Last summer, I took some of the edgers that were stacked on the side of the house and blocked off a little garden area. I decided to plant sunflowers. I started the seeds in little plastic pots on the lanai, alternately overwatering and ignoring them. The survivors made it into the flower bed.
They grew pretty quickly, benefitting from the fact that Steve kept reminding me to water the tomato plants.
It soon became evident, however, that the extreme rockiness of the soil did not allow them to get a good root system going. Even though Steve tried staking and tying them to help them stand upright, they never got strong enough stems to support or nourish themselves. Not one of the flower heads set seeds.
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We stumbled out in the early mornings to make sure the water reservoirs stayed full, braving hungry mosquitoes and the chance that our neighbors would see us in various states of (un)dress. When the tomatoes started ripening, our excitement increased, and we eagerly awaited the first of our harvest.
We finally had a couple that were fully ripened (and not caterpillar abused), so we brought them in and gloried in their home-grown flavor.
When we realized that caterpillars were enjoying more of the ripening tomatoes than we were, we decided to head them off at the pass. Fried green tomatoes!
Chef Steve carefully selected and sliced several tomatoes of goodly size, and with equal care prepared the cooking line for maximum efficiency.
Gradual Rewind
A few mornings ago, I walked into the kitchen for my second cup of coffee. Mother was sitting on the couch in the living room, saw me walk in and hollered “peep-eye!” Since then, she’s said it a few more times as she’s come around the corner to see me in the office, or when she’s sitting in the living room or den and I walk into her view. I mentioned it to Steve, and then had to explain to him that this is a southern or maybe just a family version of “peek-a-boo”.
Mother has always had a great sense of playfulness and whimsy. This new exclamation could stem from nothing more than thinking that it was a funny thing to say at the time, and continuing because our reactions are amusing. Or it could be another indication of the Alzheimer’s Rewind.
Steve asked me when she was last evaluated. It’s only been a few months. I told him that unless she begins starting fires or wandering the neighborhood, we’d stay with the annual neuro work ups.
It’s weird watching your mother grow younger as she grows older.
Stages of Alzheimers
Stage 1: No impairment
Stage 2: Very mild decline
Stage 3: Mild decline
Stage 4: Moderate decline
Stage 5: Moderately severe decline
Stage 6: Severe decline
Stage 7: Very severe decline
Stage 4:
Moderate cognitive decline
(Mild or early-stage Alzheimer’s disease)
At this point, a careful medical interview should be able to detect clear-cut symptoms in several areas:
- Forgetfulness of recent events
- Impaired ability to perform challenging mental arithmetic — for example, counting backward from 100 by 7s
- Greater difficulty performing complex tasks, such as planning dinner for guests, paying bills or managing finances
- Forgetfulness about one’s own personal history
- Becoming moody or withdrawn, especially in socially or mentally challenging situations
but perhaps moving into the beginnings of Stage 5:
Stage 5: Moderately severe cognitive decline
(Moderate or mid-stage Alzheimer’s disease)
Gaps in memory and thinking are noticeable, and individuals begin to need help with day-to-day activities. At this stage, those with Alzheimer’s may:
- Be unable to recall their own address or telephone number or the high school or college from which they graduated
- Become confused about where they are or what day it is
- Have trouble with less challenging mental arithmetic; such as counting backward from 40 by subtracting 4s or from 20 by 2s
- Need help choosing proper clothing for the season or the occasion
- Still remember significant details about themselves and their family
- Still require no assistance with eating or using the toilet
Most of the time, it’s not a big deal. She goes to the Dunedin Day Center three times a week, which she just loves. Edna, her home health aide, comes on Thursdays for her shower. We go to Felix’s Hair We Are every 6-7 weeks for our haircuts, grocery shopping every other week, to the drugstore monthly. She’s always cheerful and pleasant and easy-going.
But every once in awhile, something comes up that reinforces for me that even though the decline is very gradual, it is still there.
We went to a local restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner and had to park one small parking lot over due to the crowd. When we left, the walk from inside the restaurant, around the line of people still waiting outside, and maybe 40 yards on to our car had Mother so winded that she had to lean heavy on my arm the last few feet, and she huffed and wheezed half the way home. It has nothing to do with her lung function, and everything to do with the fact that she not only watches TV every waking moment she’s not at the senior center, but that she lies down on the couch to do it. She is so very sedentary that any amount of walking seriously tires her.
After going out to dinner for her birthday, we stopped at the drugstore to pick up one of her medications that was waiting. Since the pharmacy is in the rear of the store, she has to walk more than she would like and more than she is used to. After picking up her meds and returning to the front of the store, we had to wait a moment for Steve to check out at the front register. Since Mom was tired, she wanted to sit down, but there was no chair or bench. So, she sat down on a stack of cases of plastic water bottles in a display at the front of the store, with no idea that this was not good plan or a safety issue. I told her she couldn’t sit there, and she couldn’t understand why not, and I had to insist that she stand while she was insisting that she was tired and needed to sit. And, since Mom is very hard of hearing, this conversation was carried out at a volume to allow everyone in the store to listen in.
When we got home, I talked to her about it again, and explained that the water bottles could have fallen, then she would have fallen, then they would have fallen on top of her, and she needed to agree that in the future she would only sit on things that were chairs or benches. She agreed, but she seemed amused by it and I don’t think she really understood my concern or why I was making such a big deal about it.
Conversation
Mom: You said yesterday that today is your twentieth wedding anniversary?
Me: No, Mom. Steve and I got married a year ago. We’ve only been married for one year. Remember we had the wedding last year?
Mom: So, it’s not your anniversary?
Me: Yes, today is our anniversary, but our one-year anniversary.
Mom: Oh, okay. Happy anniversary!
Soapbox By Kay 
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