• Unremitting tiredness, a thin and faded dimension of tiredness that underlies or overlays every other ordinary fatigue—
• An unending one-way street, always leading into the same shadowy and unpoetic cul-de-sac—
• Unintelligible sentences, trying especially hard, therefore especially convoluted, when a touching topic of childhood or long-term memory comes up, and simple Yes and No answers to simple questions, but never any guarantee of valid answers to even the simplest questions, like Have you eaten?—
• Traces of the foundation left behind in a moved building: the esthetic sense intact. My mother can still tell when her hair is not done the way she likes it, and her taste is on target—none of those tight poodle-like old-lady curls. She dresses and helps to choose her clothes, and always infallibly gets the colors of what goes with what right, with an innate taste that she cannot leave behind with her verbal memory. She trained herself as a painter up to a point, an artist, and could maybe have become the Helen Keller of the Alzheimer’s world if we could tell which thread to follow. This is not merely a matter of matching colors. She knows, feels, senses? texture, fabric, occasion and fit--a sense of appropriateness, arrangement or composition, balance, that must have been written on her hard drive--and be it noted NOT because there was money or privilege in her family background, because certainly there was none. East Texas farmers who knew what grows and what does not--
  
• “I have to get back to work, you know.”—“Good.”--
• Patches of sense, like patches of firm ground in a bog with quicksand in it, a random archipelago of relatively firm footing, leading to no progress, no future—
• The lingering ability to copy: letters, aural words, good imitation of funny sounds, facial expressions, previous mannerisms—
• A residual and apparently satisfying ability to read at least some words on signs on the road or on passing buildings—

We could do so much more, beyond easy computation or even summing-up, little improvements in the texture of millions of daily lives and big moves in every context of health from Alzheimer’s to tuberculosis, if our resources were not being poured down the bloody drain of the Iraq war.