Day 18: an excess of books and my scariest midlife fear

Blogger picks up the first photo in a post and uses it in the RSS feed, so I'm putting this photo here as a placeholder, and also because I knew some of you would be as fascinated as I was. The rehearsal dinner for my nephew's wedding was held in the home of some friends of his. In their basement, they had thousands, I mean thousands, of books. There were so many crammed into the "library" that there was no good way to take a picture. So here is one row (there were four? five?) just to give you the idea. I've never been anywhere that made me feel better about my own obsessive book buying.

Shelves and shelves of books lying on their sides

OK, now that we've got that out of the way. Last night I backed out of our garage (or attempted to) with the garage door down. Photographic evidence:

Can you believe it? I didn't turn the light on, and I just didn't notice. Sam was upstairs, and he says he heard me hit the garage door remote, but apparently the door was already open and I closed it. The car, thank the Lord, was fine.

It's hilarious, I know, and believe me, my people have already taken full advantage of the chance to tease me. But I have to tell you, it terrifies me. Not because of the damage, although that is bad enough (as you would expect if you knew Doug, he was relatively sympathetic and supportive given the scope of the damage)(it took twenty minutes of messing around with it just to open it enough so that we could get the car out).

No, it terrifies me because one of my deepest fears is alzheimer's. I've always been a space head, so it's kind of difficult to tell what's business-as-usual for me and what's a sign of impending doom. My maternal grandmother had alzheimer's, and she spent the final year+ of her life curled into the fetal position, unable to speak or recognize anyone or communicate in any way. She rarely even opened her eyes. She was unable to do anything at all, but she still swallowed when they put food in her mouth, and as long as she would do that, they kept feeding her. All told, she was in a total care facility for the last NINE years of her life. The last six she was essentially unresponsive.

I just can't even tell you how much this scares me. So every time I do some stupid thing, I worry. Is this it? Am I starting to go? I do puzzles and I try to drive new routes to the same old places, and anything else I can think of to keep my brain active. But I'm not sure it will be enough.