Who's sitting next to you?

I spent the middle of the day at Big O with a big man I’ll call Big Bill.  He called himself Big Something Else, but maybe I shouldn’t say.

It was not how I planned to spend my day. 

But the right front tire on Mr. Plath’s truck heaved a slow, surreptitious sigh overnight and relaxed into a rubber puddle.  When he dashed out to catch up with his buddy at the BART station for a 12:45 first pitch at AT&T Park, that tire was flat.

“Emergency!” he called up the stairs, since he goes through life with split-second timing and there wasn’t a nanosecond to spare.  “Take me to BART, Honey, and call Triple A to fix this flat, please.”

As an FYI – I plan my mornings more loosely.  They hinge on slow starts with fresh home-made coffee, respectable progress on the Book Club assignment, a few Words with Friends and then some writing.

This is not to say I cannot swing into action when the situation warrants it.  And this was urgent.  BART waits for no one. 

In a flash, I jumped into my clothes, ran a brush through my hair, stepped into my slip-ons and darted to the driveway feeling like Mighty Mouse.  He had my car out of the garage and waiting.  Like a precision racing team, we hit the road.

On the way to the station, Mr. P. sheepishly asked if I would spend some time with the puppy since he’d be gone most of the day.  Sure Honey.  My pleasure.

We executed the drop-off with a quick swing through the bus-only lane – my bad – and he was on his way.  I turned back toward home and the flat tire and the puppy who refers to me as Second Best.

AAA came in due course, but did not fix the flat, or put on the spare.  Instead, the burly tow truck driver with an Elvis complex and a suspiciously visible tattoo high on his right front chest – yes, chest!  I don’t think the lapel of that jumpsuit was tucked in by accident! – pumped up the tire and directed me to take the truck to Big-O to get it fixed. 

Thank you.  Thank you very much.

But Big-O’s good, in case you don’t already know it.  Their tire?  They’ll fix it.  Free.

But of course you have to get in line.  That’s where Big Bill comes in. 

I’ll tell you how I first felt about Big Bill:  I didn’t want to talk to him.  Oh – he’s not the Big O guy who greeted me immediately, ascertained the problem, took the keys to the truck and deftly worked me into the queue. 

No, Big Bill was a stranger.  A big man with a purple ear who came in after me and distinguished himself with his deep voice, not upset but frustrated, he said, at having to spend so much time in the Big O lobby. 

Great.  And the only empty chair was next to mine.

I tried to shine him on at first.  I smiled tepidly when he eased himself down next to me saying he was tired of the mysterious problem that kept resurfacing with his valve stem.

He shifted in his seat.  He watched shamelessly as I worked a crossword puzzle on my phone.  “Boy, you’ve got good eyesight to see something that small.  Can’t you make those letters bigger?”

Another meek acknowledgement.  But before I knew it, he caught my eye.  Maybe people would be calling my dad ‘Big Roy’ if he were still around. 

I considered telling Bill his ear was purple, but he told me first.  The medication for an irritation in his ear – side effect of his hearing aid.  It stained his pillowcase too. 

Oh?  So I’d been in education? 

He was in medicine.  Radiology.  Thirty-seven years.  Retired from Kaiser twice – went back a while when they were short-handed.  Ran a walnut orchard and orange tree farm at the same time he was reading X-rays.  Same amount of water.  Same fertilizer.  Made good sense.

He knew Matt Cain pitched last night and Jake Peavy was pitching today.  We both like Brandon Crawford.

Oh?  The truck’s ready?  Nice to meet you, Big Bill. 


Very nice to meet you.

Kevin Bacon never forgets

Trying to remember…have I already written about Alzheimer’s disease?

No.  No, I haven’t.  I’m sure of it.  Pretty sure. 

This much is certain – I follow every trick and tip I discover to stave off that thief of noodles. 

That’s why I play Words with Friends.  It’s not a deadly time-killer that beckons its victims to the Qi at any pause in their action-filled lives.  No!  No it’s not.

WWF is ‘way more than a silly electronic game of Scrabble!  On the contrary, WWF constitutes a pointed effort to hop up the hippocampus.  Oh my yes! 

I can’t tell you how happy I am to find that my compulsive pastime plays a preventive role in saving synapses.

It’s good to find evidence to back up my here-to-fore defenseless argument about why those little yellow lettered squares mean so much.

I learned it at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, 2014.

OK.  I didn’t go to the Alzheimer’s Conference.  Couldn’t find my car keys.  Forgot to mark my calendar.  Missed the flight to Copenhagen.  Yuk yuk yuk groan.

But here’s the good news for us addicts of WWF – not to be confused with the World Wrestling Federation, which, most likely, is bad for your brain – straight from the AAIC:  Traditional pastimes like playing card games and working puzzles help to increase brain volume! 

Evidently when it comes to brains, size does matter.

And these findings build on previous studies which have linked playing video games to larger brain structures. 

Would someone please tell Mr. Plath?  He makes a point of needling me at every opportunity just because my fingers twitch whenever my iPhone plays that tinkling notification that one of my nemeses has sent me another WORD! 

I cannot not respond…!

On the other hand, please don’t tell my boomerang son who plays video games, or more accurately, a particular video game, with the fervor of a young suitor pursuing the woman of his dreams.  He lives for long stretches in that virtual world where an actual woman is unlikely to materialize.  Unless perhaps, she also has heard the Call of Duty.  A mother can hope.

On the bright side, his brain must be bulging against his ear drums.

Another favorite game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, builds brain power too. 

Oh you may think of Six Degrees as an exasperating exercise that movie buffs use to clear a room.  It works well for that; but it is much, much more.

Six Degrees is a memory exercise that constructs a web of actors, their playlists, full movie casts and connections over time in Hollywood history.  That’s an elegant metaphor for a neural network! 

Case in point:  Just this week I happened upon a snippet of “Footloose” starring Kevin Bacon; and guess who costars in it?  John Lithgow! 

Instantly, my dementia defiant system of associations kicked into gear like a Rube Goldberg machine:  My memory mouse ran down that 1984 “Footloose” ramp, hopped onto the Ferris Wheel, swung around and jumped into a canoe.  From there, she paddled up to the ladder leading to 2014’s “Interstellar” starring Matthew McConaughey and, wait for it…John Lithgow!

So, “Interstellar’s” entire cast:  McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Michael Cain, Matt Damon, Ellen Burstyn, Anne Hathaway and lots more – all connect to Kevin Bacon via John Lithgow.

That spans generations of movies and dozens of second-degree connections!  All those actors’ playlists!  I couldn’t wait to explain all this to you! 

Isn’t it just so cool?!!

Oh.  OK.  I get it.  You’re not a movie nerd.  But you get the brain-building analogy, right?  I mean, it’s at least as good as pinochle.  Come on!  You have to give me that!

And Kevin Bacon is more interesting than Super Mario!  In another study cited at the AAIC, German researchers had people playing Super Mario 64 – a 1996 video game from Nintendo – for 30 minutes a day over 2 months and then compared their brain volumes with those of a control group.

Guess who had larger grey matter structures in areas of the brain associated with memory, spatial navigation and strategic planning?  John Lithgow!

Wait!  No!  I meant Kevin Bacon!  No!  No!  What was I doing?  Where was I going with all this?

Oh yeah.  Defeating dementia through distracting diversions.


See?  It works!

Multi-taskers, beware!

 If nothing else, the Rain Man could focus. 

Turns out, multi-tasking is a bust anyway.  Research now shows that multi-taskers get less done, are crabbier and frequently irritate those around them.

That was me back in the days of my employment.  Or as we say in English, “That was I.” 

Now, in my leisure, I’m a ray of sunshine.

When I was working I felt tremendously important to be so extremely busy.  Oh, the hectic life!  Don’t you wish you were like me?  Look!  Look how harried I am!  So sorry you aren’t stretched like the elastic in your grandma’s underpants. 

On any given day, I switched between making to-do lists and crossing items off again, to checking email, writing memos, running meetings, having impromptu phone consultations and just generally ping ponging around the joint.  

To a detached observer – say a white-coated lab geek with a clipboard – I might have looked like Groucho Marx in that movie where he and his brothers go in and out of doors in a common hallway, knocking skulls, creating a commotion, honking horns and meeting each other coming and going.

Thank goodness those who worked with me bought into the multi-tasking = efficient myth!  Or at least I think they did.

Now the word is out – that frenetic MO is more mentally draining and less effective than rearranging one bureaucratic piece of paperwork at a time.

In her book Overwhelmed: Work, Love,and Play When No One Has the Time, Brigid Schulte reports that today, people in the workplace say they’re too busy to do pretty much everything including eat lunch, make friends, date and sleep – they’re even too busy to have sex!

Now wait just a minute!  Some things are sacred!  When’s the last time you went without a little shut-eye?

A niece of mine is still in the workforce and moving up the ranks in her company.  She posts her corporate life on Facebook and recently mentioned that she’d had a sleepless night.  I was about to express sympathy – I used to wake up routinely at 2:36am and thrash through the agenda for my upcoming day until the alarm went off at five. 

But before I could formulate my comment, one of her friends retorted, “Sleep is for the weak!” 

There it is.  No sympathy.  Keep up or die!  Multi-taskers have the mentality of predators.  Or self-preserving prey animals that panic and leave their co-workers behind to be consumed by god-knows-what if they slow down or show vulnerability.    

Schulte cites psychologists who write of treating burned-out clients who can’t relinquish the notion that the busier you are, the more you are thought of as competent, smart, successful, admired and even envied.

But in fact, multi-tasking makes you dumber — dumber than being drunk or stoned.  Studies have shown that no two tasks done simultaneously can be done with 100 percent of one’s ability.  

It’s true – I had to quit looking at my cell phone in the car, even at a stop sign, the day I realized that each time I picked up that glorious gadget, I also relaxed my foot off the brake!

Furthermore, the distractions from too many things going on at once hamper a person’s “spam filter.”  Multi-taskers lose the ability to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information.  Put bluntly, multitasking makes you stupid.

And worse, neuroscientists have found that so much distraction shrinks your prefrontal cortex!  That’s the seat of human intelligence!  When a human being feels pressed for time and overwhelmed, that part of her brain curls into a fetal position and cries, “Mama!”

Uh oh.  You don’t suppose that’s irreversible, do you?  I mean, all those years looking smart but getting dumber?  My prefrontal cortex withering.  

Or is this just it?  Am I done with the gray matter?  Gone, gone, gone?  Like tooth enamel, irretrievable. 

All those Words with Friends to no avail.  Games on Lumosity…?  Just getting good at the games!? 

No worries.  Smaller brain, fewer demands.  And I’m pretty darn adept at the short list of tasks I approach on any given day, one-by-one, in sequence.


First I wake up and read my book.  Then I have a cup of coffee.  Next I might take a walk.  And before you know it – one minute to Wapner!