Brain Book

by Pat Antonopoulos

I rarely forget where I put the car keys, my current library book, my purse. Food on the stove doesn't burn and nothing gets locked in the car. My calendar keeps us on time and in the right place each time. With the help of two patient friends, Patti and Wood, I have learned to blog on my new computer.

Because my mother spent the last years of her life fighting dementia, I became familiar with some of the tests administered to test her awareness. In a 'just-in-case' moment, I decided that the "subtract 7 from 100 and continue to zero" must become as easy as reciting the alphabet. To be on the safe side, I put encyclopedia in my list of words to spell backward. Imagine--preparing for dementia!

Light switches do seem to migrate from one side of the doorway to the other and the appliance dials have a way of malfunctioning, but only after 8:00 PM. On the rare occasion, I have looked out the passenger window and taken a nano-second to orientate.

However, the huge display of Brain Books makes the message very clear---- unless---' clarity' is one of the nouns no longer functional. People my age are told we need to do both physical and mental gymnastics, push ups for the muscles and connections for the gray matter.

So I bought the book, thumbed through it and immediately noticed a huge editing error.
All the language activities were English 101 type exercises...too easy, too predictable and kind of fun to whip right through. But the math activities! Why would that much quoted rocket scientist spend time designing totally unreasonable math stuff for such an easy language book? And who invented Sudoku? More importantly, WHY invent Sudoku? If all the columns and rows add to the same number, why not just tell me the number and move onto a crossword puzzle?

Is there a second Brain Book in my future? Maybe, but someone needs to do a better job of balancing the material---say ratchet up the language stuff and understand the proper use
of the 'delete-all-math' key.