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instructing the freelancer in the art of reporting, letting a good story tell itself. Junger, an excellent student with extraordinary drive, excelled beyond all expectation. I find myself today in the midst of my own perfect storm—a rogue wave of fear, perhaps a life unfulfilled.
    On a bookcase in the corner are photographs of my children—Brendan, Colleen, and Conor, and my wife Mary Catherine—all reminders of a past and a fleeting present. There is a recent precious photograph taken by Colleen at an Alzheimer’s fundraising marathon that she ran in Boston. The photo is of a pure white running cap alongside two purple wrist bands, the symbolic color of the battle against Alzheimer’s, all arrangedon a stark linen table cloth. She wore them in the race.
    The cap is inscribed, “Dad, this is for you.”
    ****
    Dementia runs in my family, practically gallops on some branches of the family tree. My maternal grandfather, George Brown, died decades ago of “hardening of the arteries,” a code word then for Alzheimer’s or vascular dementia. I had a chilling front-row seat as a child, and later, head-on with my mother’s slow progression of a death in slow motion. My dad, in the waning months of a complicated medical history, was also diagnosed with dementia, and his only brother, my uncle, now suffers from a variant of Alzheimer’s. The images are piercing.
    In 2009, I was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, several years after first experiencing early symptoms and after a horrific head injury sustained years earlier in a bicycle accident that doctors say “unmasked” a disease in the making. Dumbass that I was, still am, I wasn’t wearing a helmet at the time. Repeated clinical tests, an MRI, and a brain scan confirmed the diagnosis. The brain (SPECT) scan revealed “a large deficit involving the temporal parietal and also occipital lobes bilaterally,” as noted in the blunt 80 pages of my medical records. That’s code for pack your bags. Another test revealed that I carry a gene called ApoE4. Present in about 14 percent of the population and implicated in Alzheimer’s, ApoE4 is a known genetic risk for the disease.
    Inheritance indeed is a mixed bag. Doctors tell me that I’m working off a “cognitive reserve,” a reservoir of inherited intellect that will carry me in cycles for years to come. They tell me to slow down, conserve the tank. I’m not sure how much reserve remains; I guess I’ll find out how smart my mother was. I’m hoping she was a genius. The brain I inherited is like an old Porsche engine. It has to crank at high speeds, or it sputters. When I run out of gas some day, I hope I pull off the road to a place with a water view. For now, I keep driving, foot to the floor.
    I strive to keep the focus today on living with Alzheimer’s, not dying with it.
    But the view within is out of sync many days. The “right side” of my brain—the creative sweet spot—is mostly intact, although the writing and communication process now takes much longer. The left side, reserved for judgment, executive functions, and financial analysis, is in a free fall on bad days. Doctors advise that I will likely write and communicate, with diminishing articulation, until the lights go out, as other functions continue to wane.
    â€œPlan for it,” they have advised me.
    But as the great Bambino once said, “You can’t beat the person who won’t give up.”
    These demons , I keep telling myself, don’t know who they’re fucking with!
    Years ago, I thought I was Clark Kent, but today I feel more like a baffled Jimmy Olsen. And on days of muddle, more like Mr. Magoo, the wispy cartoon character, created in 1949, who couldn’t see straight, exacerbated by his stubbornness to acknowledge a problem, or like Mr. Potato Head, with the wacky pushpins and all. The genius of Brooklyn-born investor