the doogie howser post

This one's verbal (awesome, eh?)*.

*In case the audio (scroll down) doesn't work - and it takes about ten seconds for the voiceover to start - you'll have to imagine me speaking (making this post indistinct from all other posts).

It is better not to get old, Carney's Nanna Elina told me yesterday. About three thousand times. She has dementia and was stuck on a loop involving a clock that told her what day it was, her diary and the pills she has to take after breakfast. We went around to bring her supermarket shopping and tidy up her garden. It was hard work - mainly because she didn't want her garden done... In Shakespearean form:
Elina: "Don't cut the lawn, having long grass and plants growing makes the air cleaner and better for the lungs...". Repeat one million times.

While that part was bleak, without sounding trite, it was lovely to be around a Nanna-type. It really made me miss mine...

Anyway, and this is tenuously linked, when I was about 19 I took up tap dancing. It was in a beginner/intermediate class and the only other person as useless as me was this older woman who looked a bit like Shirley Temple only about 70 years older.

We got chatting in one of the breaks and she said she'd grown up an orphan, lived in foster homes, had a pretty tough childhood all round. She'd always always wanted to tap dance but it really wasn't an option. So she was thrilled to be at these tap classes, didn't care how bad she was (and she was an awful dancer, I have to say), it was that fulfilling of a life long dream. I kind of imagine that in the movie of her life, this would have been the closing scene.

The tenuous link here is 'the end'... And I can't help but think I want the tap dancing movie version, rather than the dementia-d one. But really, I guess that doesn't make me the most unique person in the world.

Kitty