A few scenarios were rolling through my noggin like one of those quick-cut montage moments in film that happen before the opening credits: A 97-year-old man alone possibly (hopefully) with his cane moving up the busy street past the frozen yogurt place and Yucaipa Urgent Care on his way to the boulevard; the self-same man walking slowly around a parking lot looking for a white four-door Honda Civic; the man in the back of an ambulance; the man sitting in the dining room of his new building eating lunch. Any of those were possibilities along with a few variations.

I was stuck in a slowdown on the 10 freeway in that white four-door Honda Civic, which is now my car, having gotten a call a few minutes earlier from the general manager of the independent living building where my dad had just moved four days earlier that he had tried to check out of his room and was now looking for his car and couldn’t find it. She’d tried to entice him into the dining room for lunch, explaining that “your daughter probably has the car,” then she’d called me.

The mind is a wild place, my friends. Ever since my dad’s move into his one-bedroom apartment, he’s been very alert. Where he’d mostly been a morning and afternoon napper, he was now wide awake at all hours, looking around and wondering how long we’d be staying at this hotel in this town we were traveling through. And where the hell was his car? How would he get home?

This was not unexpected. The trauma of moving from the place where he’d lived for thirty-plus years to an apartment building, something he hasn’t lived in for decades, is completely understandable while also disconcerting and a nail-biter. Will he return to the hear&now given he’s currently toggling between his mid-life self who lived in Pasadena, made art, and drove to meet friends for martinis in a red-leather-booth joint down the street and the later-in-life (ten years ago) guy who meets his golf partners and plays 18 holes? We rotate through a top ten of “Is this all my stuff?” “Who’s running my life?,” and a personal heartbreaker “I want to go home.” Sometimes, actually fairly often, the mental needle will land on “This place is OK.” Then I breathe. This emotional song cycle cues up after sleep of any kind. He has no recollection, literally none, zip, zero, of the nuts&bolts of this move. No memory of agreeing to it or any of the details around it. I can come to terms with being the baddie if I need to. And while his anger flares up, then ashes out into acceptance, I haven’t as yet been burned badly by it, but the anticipation of these loop-di-loops has my adrenaline pumping high even if my outward-facing self is calm in the conversation. And oh, the whiteboard! The beauty of writing all the things on it that he needs to know: This is your one-bedroom apartment. It costs $—- a month and includes meals, etc. Breakfast at 8, lunch at noon, dinner at 5.30 in the dining room downstairs. Last night I pasted up another sign on the back of his front door: “Hello! You don’t have a car. This is your one-bedroom apartment. I love you!”

I raced into the building yesterday to learn he was back in his apartment. One of the excellent folks who work there had pointed him in the direction of his place and he’d stepped through the door and sat down, which was where I’d found him. He was not angry. He seemed fairly chastened. We talked about why he doesn’t have a car and how this new apartment of his was where he lived now. He looked around and came to “it’s pretty comfortable. I’m fine here.” I’d brought over his art table and collaging items, set them up on the desk in his bedroom and hee sat and stared at it all for a while. Maybe he’ll step back into the creative bits in his brain.

We went out to lunch. Waved at Franny and Danny, Judy and Mitch, Sylvia, all the lovelies we’d met throughout the week as we went to the dining room together. He’d actually done a solo lunch the day before and told me he’d met a couple of nice people. Every step into the hear and now I celebrate. As I head out the door on this, his fifth day there, to bring him some fancy coffee and escort him down to lunch, I don’t know who I’ll find. I mean, I know WHO I’ll find, but I wonder what stage of thought I’ll find him in. The mind and memory, what a wild ride. And yes, it’s true, we’re all just traveling through.