The Art of Losing

I.  The Art of Losing

I met with T yesterday, a man living with Alzheimer's who is looking to hire an art-sparker, along with his wife, and it feels like we could work well together. Alzheimer's has dampened T's fire, but he's still an energetic extrovert, which I think will complement my lower and slower energy.
We have our first art-making date in a few days.

I'm excited to get going on this. 
I can imagine growing an art-making service for people with Alzheimer's and other dementias. 
And, speaking of poetry, I could call my service  

Mastering the Art of Losing

from Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "One Art":

... Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I doubt everyone would like that, but I think T might.
He was telling me he loves meeting strangers, and I took a risk and said, That's great-- Alzheimer's means you'll be meeting a lot more strangers, over and over again.

He laughed hard.

He'd also told me he was worried that Alzheimer's would take away his sense of humor, and I said that was not my experience working with people with advanced dementia. They laughed a lot, if there was something to laugh at.

But maybe other people stop laughing with and around them?
Easy to do, as exhaustion and fear and isolation take over.
Art making may help lift some of that.

I don't know that I believe in much, but I believe in art.
Maybe that sounds highfalutin? I could just say, I believe in making stuff––music, food, scribbles, whatever.
 ____________________________

 II.  The Art of Writing: Spotlight

If you go see Spotlight, which I recommend, and you're a writer or an editor, you might just be the only one to laugh out loud, like I did, when the editor of the Boston Globe (Marty Baron, played by Liev Schreiber) takes his red pen to the draft of the article that revealed the Catholic hierarchy knew for decades that some priests were raping kids.
Pretty much the only funny scene in this good movie.

Below: Not the actual scene, but this is the feel of the movie, for the most part:

This movie avoids sentiment (again, for the most part), but it is a hymn of praise to a bygone era of newspaper-funded investigative reporting as much as it is an exposé of systematic child abuse in the Catholic Church.
The team of journalists worked for almost a year before they published their findings---though that was in 2001, watching it evokes nostalgia:
what newspaper can pay for this time and team anymore?

You've seen, I'm sure, that National Geographic is now owned by Fox.
That sure feels like a disaster.