Try to Remember

<I>Try to Remember</I> is a six-year journey through the memories and musings of a man diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It opens with a moment of Greg's forgetfulness an early symptom of the disease that would exile him to a nursing home for the rest of his life.</P>Mostly it is stories told to anyone who would listen: of his boyhood in the early 20th century in a small village in Minnesota spending summers from the age of ten with harvest crews throughout the grain belt states; his early adulthood during the Great Depression and the less-trumpeted dust bowl years when jobs were scarce and ill-paid.</P>He remembers his joys during courtship marriage and fatherhood; his triumphs as an entrepreneur involved on the fringes of Canadian politics: his love of horses.</P>His mind returns again and again to summers at the family lake cottage; the night a bear raided the icebox; the day he feared a daughter had drowned; the night the Northern Lights spectacularly outshone Fourth of July fireworks.</P>The memories are funny and sad exciting and mundane terrifying and comforting. As scattered as his memories is his fleeting awareness that his mind was failing him.</P>