It was one of those articles that, at first, provided further evidence of the continuing folly of my existenc : dementia patients improve when they sing show tunes. My response? I hate show tunes. And because of that I don't know any show tunes. If I were in a nursing home where people sang show tunes, I would become overtly anti-social and consigned to a straitjacket; it would be explained away as a symptom of my illness; but somewhere deep inside my demented self would live a glimmer of fierce desire to explain to these scientists that it's not the show tunes, dammit, it's the blinking singing, you eedjits; which desire to explain would, of course, be folly because I would be too far gone to do anything about it, and because, well: folly: I was born with two heads.
But then I calmed down when I realized that I had cracked the nut and had the answer that the scientists did not have: singing was indeed the key. The scientists were barking all around it and came up with their lame correlation, but that was okay; they were Lamarck and I was Darwin, and I was cool with that.
The next thing was, "what would I sing?" And my instincitive, unthinking response was "La Marseillaise," which I then belted out at the top of my lungs to the alarm and general discomfiture of my dog Lizzie and my daughter's dog Zoey, who was visiting. They joined in, and not--from the looks on their faces--out of a sense of patriotism.
Then the doorbell rang and the dogs' attention was diverted to a more insidious threat: the UPS man, who for some reason didn't stick around. A flatbed scanner had arrived that I was going to employ for archival follies.
Probably because of the power and influence of the singing, I decided to put the scanner to the test with a 3-D object: Lazare, a French revolutionary sans-culotte crocheted by my mother long ago.
Then in the early evening rolled in horror stories from Paris, and today I find myself quite at a loss, feeling very much 9/11. Allons enfants.
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