My grandmother asks what day it is roughly forty times between breakfast and the evening news. For the first month my uncle answered honestly and completely, with the date and the day and sometimes the weather, as though the repetition were an accident that could be corrected by better information. By the second month he had shortened it to a word. By the third he had started saying Thursday regardless, because she asked most often on Thursdays and the odds were reasonable. He told us this at dinner, as a joke, and nobody laughed, and afterwards he did not do it again. The nurse who visits on Wednesdays explained the mechanism to us patiently. The question is not really about the day. It is about whether the world is still where she left it. An answer delivered warmly satisfies the question for about four minutes, and an answer delivered flatly satisfies it for slightly less. The difference, she said, is not in the words at all. What she did not say, and what took me longer to work out, is that the repetition is only unbearable for the person who remembers the previous thirty-nine. For my grandmother, each one is the first. There is a version of patience that consists of waiting for something to stop. That is the version I had, and it ran out in about five weeks. The version my aunt has is different and I have not managed to acquire it. She answers as though the question were interesting. I asked her once how she does it. She said she had decided early on that she was not answering a question. She was saying hello. It is Thursday, incidentally. It genuinely is. My uncle rang this morning to point this out, and he sounded delighted, and I understood exactly why.