Home Alone

I think I mentioned a while back that Dave Barry (from whom I have shamelessly adopted many writing techniques) has a Substack, unsurprisingly entitled “Dave Barry“. For a very reasonable yearly fee of sixty Canadian dollars, readers can leave comments, trade anecdotes, etc. You should check it out. That guy is 79, eleven years older than I am, and still cranking out hilarious stuff every two weeks.

In April 2025, Dave put up a post entitled “Marriage and Dementia“. That post was based on a controversial article emanating from Florida State University (Motto: We Forgot Our Motto.) which “somewhat shockingly suggests that unmarried people are less likely to develop dementia“. There are a lot of confounding factors in that study but that aside, it actually may make some sense.

If you aren’t married, no one will accuse you of using the wrong settings on the washing machine; no one will wake you up at night because they heard a weird noise; no one will hog the covers; no one will insist on hanging a gigantic picture of Santa in the living room at Christmas, to temporarily replace the equally huge bison photo that hangs there the rest of the year. Not that I have anything against Santa, or bison.

My point here is that you may have significantly lower stress if there is no one else living in your house, except possibly your dog. Your dog will never give you any grief about the laundry and is always happy to see you. Lowered stress means lowered cortisol and lowered cortisol means less shrinkage of the Hippocampus, conveniently located in your brain. In case you didn’t know, the Hippocampus is not a university named after Hippocrates: it’s the region of your brain involved with “memory formation, learning, spatial navigation and emotional processing”. Shrinkage of the hippocampus is associated with dementia.

Because I’ve been married for a total of almost 45 years now (just not to the same person), I’m certainly looking over my shoulder these days. My recall of trivia and stuff that happened 40 or 50 years ago isn’t quite as fast as it used to be, especially if I’m in a social setting such as appearing live on Jeopardy. But I get by. I’m more easily distracted though, forget where I set down my phone and there are the usual issues of aging that appear no matter whether you share a house or live alone.

Here are some examples:

Usual Signs of Aging Example #1: Loss of Near Vision

Alert readers will recall that I posted about a project which my daughter Alex and I finished in November 2020: Sam’s Study DIY kit. That study was filled with several hundred handmade teensy items such as faux plants, faux books, a tiny Karl Rove action figurine, etc.

Here’s a close-up:

Unable to resist self-flagellation, and also because the Study was eventually ravaged by a pack of marauding Borrowers, Alex and I recently finished another DIY kit: Simon’s Coffee Shop.

It took about four years to complete the Coffee Shop. Having a baby along the way slowed things down somewhat. (To be clear, Alex is the one who had the baby.) Anyway, here’s the finished project, which also has some teeny books but mostly features myriads of indescribably teensy items painstakingly glued together from even teensier bits of things.

And here’s a close-up:

For some reason, I feel like Sam and Simon are probably related: identical twins, possibly. Or at least, fraternal twins. And you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with aging. What it has to do with aging is that I don’t recall having had issues assembling Sam’s Study but I definitely needed help reading the instructions for Simon’s Coffee Shop with the aid of my granddaughter Sophie’s toy magnifying glass. Word got out to my son Drew, who promptly turned around and gave me these LED-assisted, goggles complete with a set of magnifying lenses (not shown) for my birthday:

I think they’re actually pretty righteous but maybe a little daunting if worn at night around small children. I think I’ll leave the porch and house lights off and wear them on Hallowe’en though.

I have another set of goggles that are less daunting but sadly, they don’t illuminate or magnify. If I ever take up bee-keeping though, I’ll probably wear them.

Usual Signs of Aging Example #2: Easily Distracted

One morning a few weeks ago, I needed to take my dog, Sarge, to get groomed in Okotoks, a town about 45 minutes south from where I live in North Calgary. I was running around trying to get out the door on time and was distracted because I was trying to co-ordinate with friends at a golf course while Sarge was getting a makeover. I also had to do a fifteen-point turn to get out of the garage because my wife Jeanette’s vehicle was occupying the center of the driveway, which didn’t help.

Anyway, I left the house and bombed down the main highway. Forty minutes later I was turning on to the off-ramp leading to the town. I shoulder-checked for some reason and was struck by the horrible realization that I had left Sarge at home. Alone. (Honest mistake: most of the time, Sarge just flops down in the back seat and doesn’t surface until we stop moving.)

I pulled over and called Liz, the groomer:

Me: Liz, it’s George. I’m just coming into Okotoks. You’re not going to believe what I did.

Liz: What?

Me: I left my ##5?!**$ dog at home!

Liz: Helpless laughter.

When she stopped laughing, she said she had done a similar thing on several occasions, told me to go home, fetch Sarge, and come back. Which I did. I was able to drop Sarge off, meet up with my friends and then fetch Sarge -whose tufted, pointy Grinch feet were no more- and headed home. On the way, I called Alex.

Me: Alex, you’re not going to believe what I did.

Alex: What?

Me: As I was exiting off Highway 2 to Okotoks, I suddenly realized that I left Sarge at home.

Alex: Helpless laughter (which lasted well over a minute).

Fortunately, all is well. Jeanette didn’t insist that I undergo an immediate cognitive evaluation. She laughed at the magnifying goggles. And yesterday I happened to be watching the 2001 John Cusack movie Serendipity and out of nowhere, without even trying, I suddenly remembered that the female lead was Kate Beckinsale. So there’s hope. Of course, if you looked like her and were also a female, I’m pretty sure people would never forget your name:

And for some reason, the comment I left on Dave’s “Marriage and Dementia” post last year is still getting likes fifteen months later. So there’s more hope. Here’s the comment:

“There’s also actual sharing of sensory organs. My wife is short-sighted and at night she has to locate large objects, such as our house, by touch. I, on the other hand, don’t wear glasses; my near vision is still pretty good in strong light. So I’m the seeing-eye husband. My hearing has lost a lot of bandwidth though, thanks to listening to too many bands, such as the Rock Bottom Remainders*. Plus I had my left eardrum surgically replaced when I was 27. (I’m not making that up.) Consequently, I can’t hear worth shit. However, my wife is the all-seeing ear-not to mix metaphors. She can hear me setting the dial on the dryer from two floors away and instantly knows if I used the wrong setting. All that aside, thankfully we still have our hair. And our teeth.”

*In case you didn’t know, Dave Barry plays in a band called the Rock Bottom Remainders. He’s the one on the left and he still has lots of hair. Not sure about the teeth.