Tom Dresser
Susan Desmarais recently retired as a Vineyard outreach worker. As a social worker, she is cognizant of privacy issues regarding confidentiality of her clients. What follows are her views on Alzheimer’s disease.
After this long, cold winter, I find myself in a delightfully warm, invigorating spring with a fever I cannot contain.
I’ll explain.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?
Those iconic words have rattled around in the back of my head for more than four decades. It never crossed my mind I would someday reach that milestone. Sixty-four! Why that borders on the upper end of middle age, for goodness sake. But here I am, ready to face the music, so to speak.
I am not what is generally considered a Y person. However, my recent gluttony over the holidays, spurred by an errant early New Year’s resolution, necessitated some kind of serious intervention. The Y seemed a likely option.
Under bright, chilly skies this past Tuesday, with a steam shovel in the background, key members of the Martha’s Vineyard YMCA broke ground for a new teen center.
Our hot tub broke down last Monday, making it no longer hot. On Wednesday, my grandfather’s clock jammed; it takes six months to clean and repair. You guessed it: on Friday Michael deBettencourt gave the last rites to my 15-year-old, 275,000 mile Geo/Prizm/Toyota. It was a long week.