"Rosie...are your boys with you?...because they're not with me...they were here, but now they're gone...they were sitting on the porch steps and now they're gone...they were just here...thank God you picked up...I decided that my first call would be to you and then I would search the woods...my next call would be to the police and...shouldn't I call them?"

Not surprised, and only slightly mystified at not being surprised, I answer gently and slowly and naturally, as if I had rehearsed for this moment all my life, "That would have been a good strategy, Mom, "except for the you-searching-the-woods-in-the-night part, had the boys actually been with you. But they're not. They're with me. They've been with me all day. The boys are right here, and they're fine. They're playing and talking about Christmas."

"Ooooh, I'm having one of those 'dreams' again, [meaning Lewy body hallucinations] aren't I?"

"Yes you are," I say calmly, "it is just a dream, Mama, it's just one of those dreams." The "just" is a lie, and I knew it. She knows it too but graciously overlooks it to spare my feelings. Or maybe the performance atones for the glitch in the script, like a bad poem slammed well. Nevertheless, the sound of my patient, reassuring voice, which sounds so much like hers, uttering words I must have heard a hundred times a hundred or so years ago, calms her. It calms us both.

As she expresses variations on the theme of relief punctuated by anxiety untainted by logic, the call catapults me back and down and into my childhood and then forward, skipping from memory to memory like stones across the river, landing mercifully on the Buddhist teachings. I redirect her with humor and we laugh of this and that.

After five or so minutes of something approximating normalcy, I inch my way back toward denial like a shy person inches toward their lover at an annoyingly loud and overcrowded party. Somehow, if only superficially, convinced that my gentle, rational words have healed her, I am unprepared when she says, "Well, thanks a lot, Rosie; I feel better now, knowing the boys are okay. But I had better go check on them." "Where, Mom?" "Upstairs. They've been asleep a long time..."

And, like the slap of the zen master during meditation, I realize that it is I who has been asleep--asleep to the truth that time stops for no woman, asleep to the fact of my specific mother's vulnerability, asleep to the reality behind the elegance of "the disease declaring itself." This is what it looks like / when neurons collide.

Tell me something, please.