Chapter 12 Dad's life in his righy-half brain

For nineteen years —6,978 days—Arline devoted herself to Walt. She displayed the qualities Walt had espoused when he summarized a teacher’s goal: to get each new class of rookies off of the bench and into the game. Walt’s stroke had made him a “rookie" disabled person;  Arline got him into the game. She developed a daily routine designed to minimize cognitive loss and to develop new skills to compensate for those he had lost. 

Worksheet: First thing every morning she would require Walter to tell her the day of the week and verbalize the names of objects in the hall bathroom. toothbrush, sink, wash cloth, etc. There were worksheets to complete with fill-in-the-blank sentences, long division problems, writing the names of five items belonging in a category (e.g., fruits, makes of cars, etc.) After breakfast there were puzzles in the morning newspaper to work. Jumble Word was a favorite. At some point in the early 1980s Arline brought out a set of colored pens and pencils and pictures of birds and animals. Walter began to learn to draw with his left hand. Examples of his artwork are displayed at the end of this chapter. 

In addition to cognitive exercises, Arline integrated physical exercise into his daily routine. At first she assisted Walter walk laps around the backyard. This exercise gave way to work out sessions on a stationary bike and daily laps at the indoor YMCA pool, with floaty rings around the limbs he could not move to keep them afloat, he had swim sessions at the Whittier YMCA. And yes, Mom recorded every lap time Dad swam, to the second. The pages fill a 3-ring binder

On September 14, 1982, about three and a quarter years after Evans’ stroke, Hillcrest Congregational Church in Whittier, where the family had attended since its founding in 1955, began a twice-a-week, two hour a day, program called Senior Caring Fellowship, under the leadership of Rev. William Meyer. 

Arline dropped him off twice a week for more than seventeen years. In keeping with her record-keeping nature, she made an entry in a notebook of 8.5x11 lined sheets for every visit, or more than 1700 entries on about 30 two-sided sheets. In a very small but very readable script, she was able to fit 60 sessions on two sides of one sheet or about 6 months. 

She kept a daily diary of Walter’s activities for 10 years between 1980 and 1990. She filled a 50 page notebook that documented every visit with special specialist Dr. Lester “Les” Harris from Whittier College. (Harris directed the college’s Speech and Hearing Clinic from 1966 to 1998.)

Chess: 

Many people were surprised to learn that Walter played chess.  Even fewer knew that his maternal grandmother, Eveline Allen, oldest daughter of James X Allen (a field surgeon for the Union Army) taught her to play during her school lunch hour. 

Eveline accompanied her husband, Samuel Burgess, annually to New York. He was a buyer for a St Louis stationary store. On a 1906 trip she challenged the reigning women's chess champion. won the match. and was declared to be the new United States Women’s Chess Champion. Arline did not play chess but Walt’s colleagues chipped in to get him a Sargon Chess computer to use at home.

Walter had many opportunities to play chess at Senior Care. Several of the volunteers learned how to play the game in order to play Walt. One, Charlotte Verdery Lightfoot, would play for 15 years.  One young man, Bill Ford, often fell behind. When a game became one sided in Evans favor, he would simply turn the board around on his next move and offer to play from the weaker position.