Three years ago I was having lunch with an old friend. The soup sounded good, so I ordered it. I dipped my spoon into the bowl, and as I was bringing it to my lips, I felt the tiniest tremor. Not so anyone would notice. But I did. I took another sip. The same slight shake of my left hand, my soup hand. Hmmmm. I waited five minutes.
“You don’t like your soup?”
“Yes, yes, I do.” My spoon quickly consumed the rest of the bowl.
As we left the lunch, I thought this was very odd. I certainly did not think: “Do I have Parkinson’s?” or “Am I going to die a dreadful death?”
But over the next month, I would test my grip by holding a spoon of coffee above the cup to see if it was shaking. No shaking.
A month later, back at the same restaurant, I had the same opportunity. I even ordered the same soup. This time, the tremor was slightly more pronounced. I paused a flicker of a second, which I was sure my lunch-mate noticed. But I was trapped. I couldn’t eat my soup with my right hand, nor could I pick up the bowl with both hands and slurp it down. It wasn’t that kind of bowl, or occasion, or restaurant.
So I ploughed through. But the more I tried not to shake, the more it seemed my hand shook. Again, it was barely noticeable. But to me, I was now officially, medically, spastic.
I got to thinking about a colleague who had a tremor years ago, and then grew into a daily fight to get his sugar into his coffee. All of us at work noticed. You couldn’t not. So I asked him: “Tell me about your tremor.”
“My doctor says it’s an essential tremor”.
“An essential tremor? What makes it essential?”
“I don’t know.”
Over the years, his tremor has grown more pronounced but still only affects his hands and when they want to do something like hold a cup to their mouth or carve the Sunday roast beef.
I remembered this because of its odd name and got online.
I didn’t have an essential tremor because I can hold that cup and cut that beef.
So I asked my physician wife, Jean, what was going on. I showed her how my left hand shakes a bit when I try to put something into my mouth by spoon, or now, by fork too. She said: “Oh, you have an intentional tremor.”
“An intentional tremor? What makes it intentional?”
“The fact that you’re intending to put the spoon in your mouth and that intent causes your hand to shake.”
I remembered my colleague’s essential tremor and my own intentional one, and thought, wow, whoever ran the Name Bank that day clocked off early. These tremors are different for sure.
Mine only kicks in when I intend to eat something, and the closer I get to my intended target (my mouth), the worse the tremor becomes. So I’ve developed a “Don’t think of elephants” strategy, not tightening my grip on my spoon the closer it gets to my mouth, but loosening it. That helps a bit.
When my tremor first appeared three years back, my first reaction was to hide in embarrassment, to try to cover for my disability. As I learned more, I got less self-conscious.
Then last week I learned that the Republican senator from Maine, Susan Collins, who’s 73, revealed that she has long had a benign essential tremor.
Said Collins, who is running in the November mid-terms, “it is extremely common.” And she has had it the entire 30 years of her Senate career. (Some 7 million Americans have an essential tremor, and 1.2 million Canadians have it. There are no figures for intentional tremors).
As The New York Times noted: “Her remarks came amid mounting online scrutiny — pushed in particular on the left — of the shakiness that is often detectable when Ms. Collins speaks, and questions about whether it has worsened with time.
Which brings up the big issue of embarrassment. Not just if someone thinks I’m unwell, but if they think I’m getting…are you ready?…they think I’m getting old.
Well, I’ll soon be 77. My father died years ago at 69, and he was old. Which shows that “old” these days is a lot older than before. But I sense you can never really outrun being old. It just comes with the territory.
Meanwhile…
1. David Attenborough crests 100. Hear him and smile. See him and weep.
2. Algorithms Bad. For two reasons: one, they shrink our horizon of possibilities. “We can’t pursue a career we’ve never heard of, read a book we don’t know exists, or encounter a community that never reaches us. Algorithmic systems create what feels like abundance while the underlying diversity narrows.” And two, they shrink our vocabulary and length of sentences. A recent University of Coruña study found that machine-generated language has a narrower range of sentence length, averaging 12-20 words, and a narrower vocabulary than human speech. Algorithms good, too. But just wanted to point out it’s always both.
Speaking of bad, no one likes to have their texts made public. But if you’re Sam Altman and Mira Murati, it gets cringeworthy.
3. The trouble with…narrative history is it creates meaning where there is none…And with dictators is they can’t stand being laughed at. And with Keir Starmer isn’t that he’s a dead man walking, but why. And with informed citizens is, there are so few of them.
4. For the birds. First, their invisible highways. Next, you can learn their songs. And why half a million Swedes wake up early to hear this.
5. Good news openings…like the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York. The premiere of the British podcast, False Flag, on how a Russian attack on Britain would play out. Plus this achingly Canadian tale about a moose and a trucker. Plus, how an international conflict negotiator takes on couples therapy. And finally, speaking of openings, commencement season is soon upon us. Stay tuned for advice like this.
6. Ted no longer Talks. The “bon vivant, TIME’s Man of the Year 1991, and a public embarrassment”, Ted Turner, changed our viewing habits forever. Jane Fonda called him “my favorite ex-husband.”
7. Old scientists aren’t like old architects. The former get less creative as they age; the latter, more. As for nurses, they just soldier on. And strippers? They change their job description.
8. THE Judy Collins plays Toronto for the last time. Later this month, one of the world’s great folk artists – she’s recorded 55 albums in her 50-year-plus career – performs at Hugh’s Room. Get tickets here for May 26, and here for May 27.
9. Take in a show and live longer. The news that doctors can prescribe visiting a museum to reduce your depression is…old news. But this week, we learned from a British study that taking in the arts, let alone taking part in them, will help you live longer. And not just going to the museum or the concert half, but cracking open a book. Especially since there’s evidence it’s just as good as exercise. It’s about time we had a big new argument to fund the arts.
10. Sir Simon Schama called the Kardamyli Festival “a nonstop glorious experience: brilliant talks; exhilarating company; glorious setting; nothing quite like it.” Join us at The Kardamyli Festival this Fall in Greece. Just a few spots remain.
Peaks by day. Ideas by night. There’s still a very few rooms available at The Canada Summit, the glorious, four-day, heli-hiking trip from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3, where four leading Canadians (Steve Paikin, Dr. Heather Ross, Ron Deibert, and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux) will discuss where we’re headed around politics, healthcare, cyber and Indigenous relations. If you can walk around your kitchen table, you can heli-hike. Details here. Register here.
11. What I’m watching. DTF St. Louis, a 7-part dark comedy on HBO/Crave. Crazy writing, twisted plotting and great acting from some old familiar faces.