In my life, I’ve usually done well when tackling new things.  Understanding has come pretty easily.

Not now.  Not in Belgium.  (I wonder why I’m smiling)

It’s good to exercise my older brain.  Making new connections in there.  Keeping dementia far away.

If I’m right about all this brain activity within the new, dementia doesn’t have a chance with me.

Exhibit One – Cello Music

Here you see the musical staff of lines and spaces for the notes – treble clef on top and bass clef at the bottom.  But what the heck is that in the middle?  Mr. Google just helped me:

I had my cello lesson yesterday.  Lieven had given me a new piece called “Meditation”.  In the middle, the alto squiggle suddenly made an appearance.  Totally foreign to this mind.

On each of of the three staffs, the first note you see is C.  As a kid, everything was in the treble clef.  As an adult, when I started singing in a choir, the bass part was written in the bass clef.  And that’s also how cello music is written.

I look at the staff in the middle and right now it’s incomprehensible.  Like a foreign language, such as Turkish.  (Sigh)

Exhibit Two – Power of Attorney

I sat with a notary today and read through the English translation of my new Power of Attorney documents.  If dementia comes my way, my friend Lydia will make decisions about property and health.

Clearly I understand English.  And there are no horribly strange words in these sentences.  Some other passages were more difficult.  But it took so much effort to follow the formal language, the legalese.  Page after page of it.  I was soon exhausted.  Again “the new” was blasting my eyeballs.

Exhibit Three – Dutch

Right now I’m in despair about my ability to learn Dutch.  My dream about having a basic conversation with neighbours who don’t speak English seems in tatters.  I hear the words and grammar, I try to absorb them, and then they float away …

Here are a few sentences from one of today’s documents.  It’s written at a level of Dutch far beyond what I’m learning now but it feels like I’m looking at what you see in the second picture (an Arabic script).

***

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

That’s a lot of laughing at me

And it’s still a good life