Time

His name is Lou, and he's 76 years old. His wife tells me he has dementia. Something about the frontal lobes, which I didn't understand, but the effect, she says, is a lot like Alzheimer's Disease. He can't learn anything new, no matter how many times you show him, he can't manage simple tasks on his own, and he has a scary tendency to wander off. On bad days, he doesn't always know who she is.

In better times, he got a degree in Engineering, raised 2 children and saved a couple peoples lives in Vietnam by efficient first aid after a shell hit his base. He was told he was going to get a medal, but it never came thru. He never cared about that, she says. He was just happy to get out alive, and anyway, he figured the combat troops should get the medals.

He must have been something special, because by the way his wife looks at him and talks to him, you can tell she simply adores him.

"I don't care what problems he has" she tells me. "I love him and I'm lucky to have him."

She didn't have any pictures in her purse of him as a young man, but we've all seen them before. Young, healthy, athletic men, with t-shirts showing bulging biceps, and smiles that show they don't have the slightest idea that someday another person will look at that photograph and try to reconcile what they see there with the frail gentleman with shaking hands and liver spots standing in front of them.

Time is weird that way. It creeps by, unnoticed, then one day, you're asking "Where has the time gone?" It changes people, slowly but inevitably, until they're completely different people. Healthy, vital young men into palsied old timers, vibrant minds into nightmarish, delusional confusion. Somehow, even tho you see the changes day by day, you don't notice the effects until something happens that makes them jump out at you and you wonder "when did that happen?"

We say it heals all wounds, but it strikes me more as a great thief, slowly taking friends, family, health, memories, and at the last, even life. It's kinder to some than others, but in the end, it betrays us all.

Lou deserved better from time than to be left standing in a daze, completely ignorant of how important he is, how much he means to others, how much more he used to be. I look at him with pity, but also trepidation, because he makes me wonder what time is planning for me. I hear my parents talking about me as a child, I have memories of myself in earlier times, and already there's a lack of recognition of that younger self. At least I still have the memories. Lou doesn't even have that.