Second Time Around

Baby boomer generation managing aged parents with dementia is a common phenomenon in today's world. Take that piece of dough and twist it into a pretzel, boil it up in a kettle of heartbreak, sprinkle it with zesty garlic salt, and dip into a spicy hot sauce. Howdy Doody! Cucumbers in the bedroom?! This is the story of Greatest Generation college sweethearts Bud and Susie, who move to Memphis, where he climbs ever upward in the business world, starting with Wonder Bread and moving on to the Holiday Inn empire. Susie longs to begin a teaching career, which she trained for and loves, but they have two babies in short order, so she must put that on hold. The book toggles between the telling of this story, set in Memphis in the 1950's, and present time, when their two baby boomer daughters, Cammy and Maggie (named after the streets they lived on-Camelia and Magnolia) find themselves caring for two aged parents with dementia. The situation is complicated by the fact that their mother lives two thousand miles away in Nova Scotia, where she moved to marry another man, leaving them abruptly when they were ten and twelve. Faced with impossible decisions, the sisters decide to travel up there and assess the problem firsthand. In the process they must deal with old emotions that had been submerged all those years, as well as come to know their mother's whole life and other family in Canada. In the simultaneous unfolding of the two stories side by side, the reader learns what went wrong in the marriage that eventually resulted in such trauma, witnesses dilemmas of everyday life with elders in various states of dementia, watches each character develop wisdom and open-heartedness, and even laughs at times. A story that reminds us life always has tricks up its sleeve for us, and how we deal with them is the variable that determines the quality of our lives.