Sometimes conversations in the locker room strike terror in me. Twenty-some years ago I was in a locker room at a YMCA in Chicago. An older woman (seventyish), looking exhausted, came in and sat down on one of the benches and announced she had just come from a terrible hour with her mother, who, I assume, must have been in her nineties. I was always having terrible hours with my much younger mother, and I had this terrible look into the future. Fortunately, it was not a prescient moment.

Today I went to exercise for the first time in a week. As I entered the locker room one woman said, "I have to call my parents and remind them they have a party to go to at 11:30." Another woman asked if they couldn’t remember by themselves. First woman said, "They don’t know what day it is. Every day is the same." Another day I hope I never get to.