Saturday, Jun. 05, 2004
Ronald Reagan, posted at 11:45 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com My random Ronald Reagan story: When he was President, presumably during his early years as President because hopefully I wasn't this confused when I was over ten, I thought that Ronald Reagan and Dan Rather were the same person. Every night, I thought, the President came on TV and told us all about what was happening in the world. I'm not sure where I got the idea, but I also thought that the priest at St. Basil was actually God. I mean, he was an old guy with a beard. Just like Reagan and Rather both had jet-black hair.I also remember campaigning against Reagan's re-election efforts when I was 7, in 1984. Actually, I only remember having a Mondale/Ferraro bumper sticker that I put on the cover of my Sorry! game.
Alzheimer's sucks. My grandmother was put into a home about five years ago after she almost blew her house up by lighting something by her gas furnace. Her Alzheimer's has deteriorated ever since, and at this point she can barely put together a coherant sentence and doesn't really recognize me. Luckily, she still seems to enjoy life, or at least she did last time I saw her. I brought Holden to see her and she loves petting him. It's still very sad to see her so lacking in the ability to function, though. She does things like eat tartar sauce like pudding and flushes everything in her little old person's dorm room down the toilet. She got moved into the Alzheimer's unit, entitled "Memory Lane," a couple of years ago so all the old folks there have the same problem, and I see many worse off than Grandma. There's this sort of unspoken thing in my family that I'm sure was in Reagan's family as well, that we all hope she never gets to the point where she doesn't enjoy life, where she's not capacitated. We all hope something else takes her before that point, whenever it might be.
The thing is, my Grandma's not that old. She was born in 1926, so she got admitted to the facility in her early seventies. My other set of grandparents are both in their mid-seventies and still travel the country and send me coupons every week. The other one can't wear her teeth anymore because she keeps trying to flush them down the toilet. The other Grandpa lived from 1911-1990. He was a P.O.W. in a concentration camp, but was released at the end of the war. He met Grandma, a young widow of the war, and took her and her son to America. My Grandpa would play the lotto with his prison number, and once won $10,000.
My thoughts are with Reagan's family right now, particularly with his wife, a cool woman who had the guts to stand up against the twice-as-conservative-as-Reagan-ever-was current administration on the issue of stem cell research. Somehow, I doubt very much that if he had been of able mind, that the Republican Party would have become as nasty as it has. He was a decent guy, and his brand of Republicanism was much more moderate and humane than it is today. Also, I can actually understand how someone could have voted for him - he was charismatic and a decent man. I can't see any of those qualities in Bush.