On Friday night I attended a benefit for the Reverend Jim Gordon, a spaghetti dinner that called to everyone far and wide to trek home for family time. When I was in high school, Jim (no one ever called him the Reverend Jim Gordon) was one of a team of preachers for one of the churches on Main Street (not mine), and the leader of what seemed to be the town youth group (that adopted me, and everyone else around).
Jim is now living with Dementia with Lewy Bodies, a disease with symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s and related somewhat to Parkinson’s. Details on this will come. But for now, we’ll travel back before all of this, to the early 1990’s and a time when the world was just becoming possible.
I think it was my friend Danielle who invited me to come to her youth group one fall Thursday night. She invited the lot of us, really, and soon, Heather, Carla, Jenny—though it was her Youth Group, too–and both Jackies were all meeting up on the hill at the parish house for three hours of music, dancing, camaraderie, potluck dinner, and a sermon that wove it all together. This was the home of Jim and Bonnie Gordon, and it was not your run-of-the-mill parish house.
The dining room, to me, was always the most striking. It ran the length of the house from the back to the front and was not filled with a stately table but rather a series of wooden picnic tables. The walls were stately, however, covered in old license plates from Pennsylvania and beyond. The living room, which paralleled the dining, was a large, open space with ramshackle couches and pillows strewn about, a stereo system on one side geared toward the playing of records, and posters of the Beatles splashed the walls. The small kitchen, that I remember being yellow/orange but it could have been any cheerful color, really, had a poster of a playground and words that I do remember, “It’ll be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” It was right above the stove.
Upstairs, there was a hallway with various rooms jutting off, each so filled with costumes and props that, on any given night, you could put together a skit with cheerleaders, Moses, the T-Birds from Grease, John and Yoko, or all of them at once.
My memory is that it was so cold my second winter at Youth Group, and there were so many people in attendance every week, that the attic was opened up for additional space. It was vast, at the tippy top of the stairs, and contained at least one pool table and virtually no heat. The walls up there were unfinished, so we were given markers and told to add our autographs. This we did, along with poetry, questions, sketches, and the like. We were figuring out who we were, what really counted, what it all meant, and how to get all of it to fit together.
Part II, coming soon… ~
On Lewy Body Dementia
The scientist Frederich H. Lewy discovered the abnormal proteins in the brain (the Lewy Body proteins) back in the early 1900’s during his Parkinson’s research. These Lewy Body proteins can interrupt dopamine flow, resulting in Parkinson’s, or can spread throughout the brain, wreaking havoc in the form of Dementia with Lewy Bodies which causes impaired attention and visuospatial function and can manifest visual hallucinations. Unlike Alzheimer’s, in Dementia with Lewy Bodies, short-term memory is affected later. Treatment involves drawing together a team of doctors, each treating different symptoms according to their specialty and in conjunction with one another so as not to allay the team’s efforts. Research goes on, but as of now, there is no cure.
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Jody Brown is the author of Upside Down Kingdom, and is a blogger, poet, and traveler.
Fine Line Books 