The final assessment of Covid’s lingering brain-walloping will come long after my sincerely walloped brain has ceased its cluttered sputter. I’ve been hit twice, fewer than most, maybe, more than those in my cohort. The second round was a gift from a friend. It happens. No hard feelings.

I took the palliative dose of Paxlovid, felt relatively little physical distress, wandered off into isolation, and went slightly off-kilter,I think, although I suspect that it isn’t really possible for a brain to assess its own dysfunction. My memory is that the mental acuity base line kept jogging all over the place at the best of times.  I would guess that we all have moments of dislocation or bouts of gauze befouled memory. Frustrating. Perhaps a bit more frequent as the decades roll along, but, if not predictable, at the very least manageable. 

Names began to slide away from me about six years ago. For longer than I deserved, I was the go-to guy on names, pretty quick to remember even the least incandescent of acquaintances. I could still bring up quasi-intact snippets of literature and significant dates in history. In the last two years, I’ve been increasingly less sure of my memory and acutely aware that names had become more than slippery. I had begun to organize my conversations so that I had time and opportunity to fish for names a bit before it became absolutely necessary to actually bring one to voice. The good news is that I have no more than two or three conversations outside my immediate family in any given week, so the circumlocution necessary to bring the right name to voice became part of the fun in watching Dad invent ways to finish a sentence without finishing a thought.

Looking back on my muddling before retreating to my bedroom for a week, I feel great fondness for the brain that eventually got where it wanted to go, eventually found the words it needed to find. That brain may not have been razor sharp, but it was capable of middle-of-the-road, adequate conversation with most people in most settings. That brain had been active enough to pull together six chapters in a new novel, active enough to slog through books and articles that were moderately challenging. That brain allowed me to watch films all the way to the end. I recall that I had the ability to sign and send messages I had composed. Pretty heady stuff.

During the week I spent in my room, I watched schlock on my computer and hoped I’d fall asleep. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I’d go for almost twenty hours as episodes rolled by. I don’t even know the names of shows or films I summoned. I lost taste and smell, though both are returning. I lost ten pounds.

This is the first post I’ve written in more than three months. It’s one thing to be an impractical cogitator and quite another to be incapable of cogitation. I’ll gladly try to scramble back to impracticality, and give myself some credit for sticking with the 44 hour audio biography of Mark Twain, written by Ron Chernow and read by Jason Culp, a masterful evocation of the puzzle that was Twain by Chernow and an extraordinary performance by Culp. I followed up with Ken Burns’ documentary on Twain, and have plans to visit the Mark Twain house, about 30 minutes south of here, next week. I’ve got Mansfield Park and Anne Patchett’s Essays waiting at the library, and I intend to write in celebration of Ichiro Suzuki’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

Inch-by-bleeping-inch.