I often find myself wondering if I’m experiencing the onset of early dementia…
(Where are you Sally Ann?)
There’s too much time on my hands and I can’t for the life of me recall what I did last week
(An internet search on your name only brings back the painful words “In Memoriam”)
It runs in the family….mostly on the female side but I was never one for tradition
(You’d only be forty five or forty six)
Sometimes I find myself going off to some pretty dark places in my head and the date on my return ticket seems to stretch out further and further
(I remember playing chess on the stoop in front of your house in Brooklyn like it was only yesterday
And the joy I used to feel is now tinged with an odd sense of foreboding or regret
(We were so young then, it was Boris Spassky versus Bobby Fischer and we’d re-create and debate their moves as if they were our own)
Is this the beginning of my downward spiral? Given my past history I thought my moment would come in the blink of an eye.
(But then you went your way and I went mine and you became of all things a doctor and I became, well, I just became)
Since my grandmother, mother and sister all went the insanity route, I thought maybe by now they’d have found a cure
(Because that’s what you were going to do, were born to do. Is there any hgher calling than that?
But I guess I’m wrong, so far, they haven’t found one.
(Where are you Sally Ann? I need you now just like I needed you then, as a friend)
And another light goes dim and I can’t see that far into the future anymore
(And maybe this time around as a little more than a friend. Can you kill something and at the same time offer up a cure?)
But the past is getting clearer by the moment.
(Where are you Sally Ann?)