Keeping our memories from the mists of Alzheimers

"God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December."

-- James Barrie

The Walt Travis I knew at San Francisco State was an amazing guy: scholar, debater, hobbyist magician, fraternity brother and one hell of a lot of fun.

He could stand before a hostile audience, face a debating opponent with the cool logic of a forensic scientist and turn him into gelatin. When the crowd booed the conquest of their hero, Walt would smile. He'd made his point.

He could also sit at a downtown bar and make coins and cigarettes vanish into thin air with the skill of a master prestidigitator, gathering a different kind of audience around him and winning free drinks for both of us.

But all of that is gone now, the tricks and the fun. The man I knew a long time ago is disappearing into himself, erased by a disease called Alzheimer's.

I was thinking about him as I watched my family decorate our Christmas tree: my son Marty and his wife, Lisa, and three of our grandchildren, Nicole, Jeffrey and Joshua. Each ornament was hung with care. Small blinking lights framed their faces.

It was important to me to lock this moment into a memory component beyond erasures; I strained to fix it in my head the way a camera lens isolates a scene. I didn't want what was happening to Walt to happen to me. There are some things that must never be forgotten.

I had heard from his wife the day before that Walt had been placed in a full-care facility, suffering from "dementia," another way of describing the malady that is sucking the humanity from more than 5 million Americans.

"Walt's short-term memory has been diminishing," she wrote, "and he reached the point where his whole personality had changed. He became easily agitated, demanding and aggressive. I could no longer care for him."

It's a sad and terrible disorder, an erosion of the core mentality that contains the history of who we are, the memory of ourselves that makes us unique. I couldn't believe it was happening to him.

I've known Walt since he was a returning World War II veteran in college on the GI Bill and I was a kid out of high school. He was a scholarly patrician who would go on to earn a PhD at Columbia University, and I was a dour and scruffy beatnik wannabe who worked on the college newspaper and wrote unintelligible poetry; I never did finish up with a degree.

He followed his dream into teaching, and I followed mine into writing.