2026 Life Logs, Day 226: The Human Experience
Date: Friday, August 14, 2026
Weather: Beautiful Weather; High Temp 82, Low 61 degrees F
Location: At Home with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
I got brave this morning and turned off the window AC that can’t possible keep this whole house cool. It is in the living room and that room is cool, but the temperature in the kitchen was 80 degrees this morning. When I opened the windows, the breeze blew through and suddenly it was 74 in the kitchen. The high humidity of the past couple of weeks has moved on for now, and we have a lovely breeze making it enjoyable to be outside again. The temperature is still in the 80’s, but it feels entirely different.
I finished the financial spreadsheet I was working on yesterday, and it felt like the weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders. Then a decision was made to cancel next week’s Indivisible meeting, also removing a responsibility that was weighing heavily since I bear the responsibility of planning the meeting activities. Everyone is so busy working for their candidates of choice in our September 1 primary that we decided to give people a gift of time and regroup again in September. My good friend and ‘adopted’ son, Kevin Russell, arrives on Thursday evening, the time of the meeting, so now I can be sure to home when he arrives.
This afternoon, I was going to visit my sister. I saw on our shared calendar that Ollie was going to play golf with his friend Simon at 2:45 pm. Since I pass right by the Falmouth Country Club on my way to and from Bridges in Mashpee, I texted Heather to see if I could give Ollie a ride. She replied with a yes, and I was delighted to have an excuse to be with Ollie. For now, Ollie has made the decision to not play high school soccer. He is going to try out for the golf team, but there is a lot of competition so he is practicing as much as he can.
After dropping Ollie off, I headed to Bridges to visit with Patsy. It was so nice outside that I decided we would spend our time together outside. She had an unopened card from her sister-in-law, Judy Alyestock, so I took that outside with us and we sat in the sun, and she read the card to me. She knew who the card was from, but when Judy wrote that Jennifer and Scott are now living in the farmhouse in Ripley, West Virginia, Patsy put the card down and looked very puzzled. I reminded her that Jennifer is Judy’s daughter, Patsy’s niece. She let that sink in and then asked, “They live in the farmhouse?” I was trying to figure out how to best help her understand, so I said that she probably remembers that Jennifer and Scott have always lived in Africa as medical missionaries, but they are now retired and back in this country. Again, there was a long silence while she tried to process the information. She finally just said she was surprised they were living in the farmhouse, but I have no idea if she had any idea where in the world the farmhouse was located. When I mentioned Ripley, West Virginia (the town her husband was from), she just looked at me with a blank stare. I tried to give her some context for where she is in Massachusetts and reminded her that she lived in West Virgina growing up. That got into a conversation about what country we live in. I asked her if she knew who the president of the United States is right now and again I got the blank stare. I told her the current President is Donald Trump and she immediately said, “Well, that can’t be good.” I got a chuckle out of that. Then it was time to go pick up Ollie, so I told her I was going to pick up my grandson Ollie. She looked and me and said, “Who gave him a name like that?” I launched into an explanation by asking her if she remembers the name of our mother. Nothing—blank stare. I reminded her that our mother’s name was Ollie and the my daughter Heather named him Oliver, Ollie for short, in honor of her grandmother. Patsy recognizes photos of my our mother Ollie, but she can’t recall names. My visits with her are a true emersion into the human experience. The human mind amazes me and memory loss is just so hard to understand. Today I wished I had a recorder to document what Patsy’s responses were to my questions. I certainly don’t need another project, but it fascinates me that she can make some connections and then she goes off into an alternate world and connects to something there. For instance, when we were talking about the farmhouse this afternoon, she looked at the tall white fence surrounding the garden and said that ‘this farmhouse’ has to have to wooden fence. It is not allowed to have stone fence. Where did that come from? Fascinating.
Tonight, I am having a different human experience. My 23-year-old neighbor, Billy, is having a party tonight. I told him he could use my grill and picnic table and at 6:30 pm about 15-20 twenty somethings arrived. They all looked like teenagers to me, but I saw the table was filled with big bottles of Tanqueray gin and other hard liquors. This is obviously not the beer and wine crowd. And the cars in the drive way are all at least 10 years newer than my car. The first to arrive was a good friend from college, Amherst in western Massachusetts. They are the only ones I really met as I was going out to pick up Jonah at the high school. By the time I got back, the others arrived, all friends Billy has met in his job as a lab assistant at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole. When I got back, I had to walk through the crowd to get inside and since then I have been hiding out in my living room. At about 8:30 they moved from the table by my front door to the fire pit. It is now 10:30 and that Tanqueray gin is definitely talking. I just hope the neighbors don’t complain because they are very loud. But it warms my heart to hear young people talking and laughing and obviously having such a good time together. Another human experience, not perplexing or hard to understand like my sister’s memory. This experience is just a wonderful reminder of how our interactions with other people ‘mature’ over the years. But how wonderful to be young, and seemingly carefree, on a Friday summer night.
