Does This Make Me Look

A year ago this month was when I really started to notice large swathes of my dad’s short-term memory swept away like Dorothy’s house. It was very selective. The memory manor next door that held his time in Pasadena as a single swinger remained intact while the conversation from that morning was completely lifted and gone. This change felt so sudden that although there were no doubt earlier breezes that had swirled around some of his mental firmament, the current vacant lots swept clean were appearing so quickly that they were too numerous to ignore. I can mark the month, in fact, I can mark the day, when I felt the force of this cognitive twister really hit. A visit to the doctor. (Sidenote PSA: If a loved one is on blood thinners such as Coumadin, please check with their doctor about when to stop taking it before a procedure. Do not assume that any medical professional will tell them to do it. File this under proactive.) It was a derm procedure he’d had done many times before but this time was unlike any of those. (Another sidenote PSA: Be a boss bitch about going into the procedure room if you have A) any protective instinct that the person needs you to, and B) despite the medical folx telling you you’re not allowed. On point A) I did. On point B) they did. I acquiesced to them.) When he came out of the procedure room he was hell-bent for leather to get as far away as he could from the offices. What had happened? He grumbled that the doc had dug into three skin cancers rather than just the one he was there to take care of. The guy was a butcher, he said. He was angry, seemed a bit unstable, and wanted to go home and put it all behind him. That afternoon he called me to say he was on his way to urgent care because the incisions would not stop bleeding. That night we spent in the emergency room because the blood just kept flowing. Because of the blood thinner. Which he hadn’t stopped taking. Because no one had told him to.

To hear him tell it, the only time he’d been in a hospital on the receiving end of a doctor’s care was when he was born in 1926. So in July of 2022, 96 years later, he was laying in a hospital bed for the first time, eyes wide open, raging and quiet, then raging and quiet, cycling through those moments for hours until the ER doctors finally got things under control. Then we went home. The next day he woke up and asked “Was that a dream?” I wish to bejeezuz I could have said yes.

And this incident began some rapid and very real moments of memory thievery. Unsettling for sure. Not at all unexpected for a man in his late nineties, yet the speed with which large swathes of mental landscape are being swept away has kept us both extremely alert. Although I’m not specifically aiming blame at the derm, I am marking that day last July as the beginning of something. An acute noticing and an adjustment of my dad’s and my communication. I’ve done and continue to do a substantial amount of grieving around the conversations we won’t have again about books, art, Jazz, what he had for breakfast (did he have breakfast?). Around the realization that he won’t be giving me any new collages or homemade birthday cards. But that the dad I talk to now is still present in his kindness and humor yet also extremely confused about the large tracts of mental moments that he’s missing. He notices. He gets a startled look in his eyes and asks “How did I get here?” It’s not an existential question. Literally, in what way did I land in this chair in this apartment in this building with these people. What is actually the deal here?

Over this last year I’ve had the benefit of wisdom from women who are either currently going through or have gone through similar moments with a parent. I am beyond grateful for those conversations and the normalizing of something we will all in one way or another be a part of. It’s not (as yet) an entry into the canon of conversation that happens naturally among women of a certain age chatting as they do. Menopause talk, yes, that’s become right out there in public. The lexicon of the modern woman speaking at a normal volume about hot flashes or maybe yelling about them because the bar’s so damn loud and they need another ice-cold drink. Because of the damn hot flashes. Or brain fog or painful sex or any number of lady wonders that now exist above a whisper for women in the prime of their life. But aging: the doing of and the taking care of others has, to my ears, not quite risen above a very low murmur, which is then paused when the bartender comes with the cold drink, and resumed when strangers are out of earshot.

Hell, yes, aging is messy, disconcerting, and all that jazz. Yet facing moments of caretaking around the body of an elder who is now veering toward toddler behavior is sobering and poignant and has in numerous ways introduced me to myself and made me proud of how I can be inside of it and grateful for the time I spend with him. It is also, a bitch and very hard. And has made me ashamed of things I say at times while challenging me to forgive myself. It’s a lot a lot a lot of things. (Sidenote quote from an NYT story: “The thing about taking care of an 85-year-old … is they’re like a toddler you motivate with gin.”) A master class in “Wow, this will no doubt be some version of me someday” humbleness. On another, an absolute fire-spike of “What the actual fuck is going on and how do I deal with it.” Not well on occasion. Such as when, having discovered that showering is really a thing he doesn’t do anymore, I decided that once a week I’d lure him into one with the promise of a martini after he’d stepped into the steam&water palace in his bathroom that is fitted out with shower chair, hand holds, and all the mod-cons needed for the elder body. But the man’s a rascal and this week (after two successful weeks of wash&wear), he apparently just stood in the bathroom with the water running, then left the area, came out, put on a new set of clothes, and inquired after his martini. “Wait, but did you take a shower?” I asked, seeing that the towel was intact, the water still running. “No. I don’t want to.” He was being honest at least. I knew he didn’t like them but I felt my wit-ends come completely undone. I reacted, “You need to take a shower at least once a week” shot out of my mouth despite the fact that scoldi-locks is not a thing that ever works. And of course it didn’t this time either. He shot back, “I take a shower every day.” And I retorted, “But you don’t” and he yelled, “Who gives a fuck?” (Yes, he can be quite salty when angry.) He then looked confused and exhausted. I then felt chagrined and exhausted. I knew, have in fact learned, that nothing good ever comes from reminding him of things. It’s an unfair conversation. I KNOW this from my talks with those wise women and the amount of google searches I’ve done on the topic of dementia. I felt bad about the shower exchange. But it was done and I know I’m human and so that’s what happened and I had to move on. I gave him his martini and am now, on the advice of a wise friend (looking at you, M), buying some of those lovely body wipes that stand in for showers.

Here’s where I’ve landed: The time I have left with him is time I want to spend being a daughter. Sipping fancy coffee on his balcony while listening and sitting and staring off into space if that’s what’s happening in the moment. Yes, paying attention and stepping into whatever care that needs doing—there will always be something big or small to notice and tidy and what-have-you—but also asking for help when I need it is on the menu. Shifting away from scoldi-locks as he and I kick back in some just-right chairs a watch the birds. Tipping the occasional glass of water onto the fire he’s started while pointing out the hummingbird at the feeder as time tumbles.

I’m not gonna lie to you, a lot of times my motives are murky. Not in a sinister way but just complicated in a mix of desire and best-face-forward. When my dad moved into his new place at the GoldenO, I was very aware of a sense that he (& by extension, me) was the new kid on the block. He may also have had that awareness but on a level much less acute given he’s only recently stopped asking when he’s “checking out of this joint?” along with “where’s my car?” The acknowledgment that this is his one-bedroom apartment and I’ve taken possession of the car surfaces 98% of the time now.

I, on the other hand, entered into his living there as if it were a popularity contest and by-george, we were gonna win the prize for best new entry into an Independent Living home! In review: The week before he moved in, I told the general manager that my dad was really excited about the change. She looked at me surprised and said, Well that’s great given most folks are really resistant for the first month or so. I was smiling as if waiting to receive a first-place ribbon for Best Transition of Oldster Into New Shockingly Discombobulating Life Event. And while I heard her words, and might have given myself permission to relax and say, Phew, right? This is gonna be hard, instead I kept that hard smile on my face in order to convince her that we were different. We were excited. The truth? My dad knew he was moving, then he forgot he was moving, then he remembered, and by the time it happened, he’d completely blanked on how and why he’d ended up here. He raged against it. He capitulated to it. He repeated that cycle consistently for at least the first six weeks. His coping? See above re: Checking out. Looking for car.

I knew that would happen. People I love and trust told me so. I read a bunch of articles that explained it. My dad is human fer-fux-sake, of course. Yet me? I persisted in wrapping my own emotional cheerleader up inside of his experience. I really don’t care for my emotional cheerleader all that much. I mean, she’s OK in small doses but is very annoying when she takes over and blocks me from really acknowledging that pain, necessary emotion, is behind that door. Put down the damn pom-poms and step into the room. But still. In this case. Oy.

A few things: In my new role as emotional firefighter, I also realize that I’m very excited about driving around in my big (wholly mental) red truck and offering to give them rides. I can honestly say that the amount of smitten I feel about the folks who live there is my own deal. My dad often seems surprised when we go down to the dining room or for a walk around the grounds and I become some sort of crazy glad-hander, pulling people up onto the truck for a ride. I spot Dee, who I’ve been hair color consulting with given she’s looking for a subtle pink for her shock-white, spiky-do hair; and Felix, who needed a crossword, four-letter word beginning with D where you talk turkey (Deli) and I was more excited than might be normal to solve it. Margaret who delivers my dad’s papers every morning is someone I dream of leaving notes of thanks for; Mitch and his violin performances every Friday afternoon where I once clapped a little too loudly (I might have whistled even); Ethel and her little dog Fargo, who I’ve apparently offered to walk on occasion. I had the urge to offer up writing workshops to them all, because me having to work? Who cares about that? I’ve taken some breaks around this frenzy of friendly. Or at least I’m trying to.

I know there’s grace and joy and pain and sorrow in all their stories. I hear when Helen talks about how much she misses the home she had to move out of near the beach because of the car accident that killed her daughter-in-law. She struggles. Norma, whose pretty sure the food has gotten better since the new owners have taken over but still doesn’t care for the new decor and Alan, who has really taken a cotton to my dad and keeps inviting him to card games. Then there’s Frank, who is one of the caretakers. He is completely committed to making sure my dad is present, accounted for, and taking part. My heart flushes with a lot of emotion as I walk through the front door, passing those who are sitting outside in the sun or in the lobby in the AC. Various waves of emotion there. The acknowledgment that we are here. Did we ever think we would be? As Felix said over lunch yesterday, I never did figure I’d be in a place like this. It’s humbling.

I’m the one who leaves. Gets in my dad’s-now-my car and drives back to my apartment. Where is he in this? He’s exactly where he needs to be. He’s watching. Not always comprehending but yet available to himself in-as-much as I can tell. When I listen to him, not just his words, I see he’s taking in the things he wants for himself. Not what I want for him. When the talking clock reminds him it’s time to go to the dining room for a meal, he hears it. And he decides. This is not a popularity contest. This is his life. And I’m coming to relax my ego that I get to be there just to make sure he doesn’t fall, both physically and emotionally. Last night he called to say a whole bunch of people brought him dinner in his apartment. He was laughing about it. Enjoyed the scene. I smiled to know that Frank and Odeena were there to jolly his scene up and then he went back to watching the odd baseball game on one of the many (many, so many) sports channels available to him. And for now, that’s his story.

On the heels of last week’s exploration of little red wagons (the emotional sort), I spent a solid amount of time these past seven days letting myself think and feel around the things in that wagon. What I kept, what I’m trying to let go of (for sure these things don’t just sink away forever, nor do they need to). I became aware of a couple of ways to look at this whole topic of fierce love. How to begin to parse it from complete emotional crutch-dom (or, in other words, shades of codependency).

First off, ways to become an emotional firefighter. Rather than anticipate a blaze, know what to do when one flares up. Sure, some clear-cutting is necessary but ultimately, once the maintenance is done let things be. (I know this whole reference to fire is possibly too fresh for those of you in areas where fires are literally affecting your lives. I’ll hew toward metaphor.) This is running through my mind because I had a great conversation about the topic this week that opened my eyes to the ways in which loving someone fiercely can also arrest their freedom. (See sad cat photo above.) I want my dad to succeed in his new place. What that looks like to me is completely different from what it looks like to him. As I go daily to set up his pills, a plate for dinner, coax him to get the once-a-week shower done, mix him a drink, set a bottle of water on the side table, turn on the Dodger game, set up the coffee for the morning, I have to wonder: How much of this is about love and comfort and how much is diminishing his autonomous activities? This list of things may have sprung from deep love yet he’s also still capable of doing a portion of the things on that list himself. That is, if he even wants to do them.

For me, the honest look is to parse out what needs to be done because he’s not johnny-on-it (take pills, take shower) and what he wants to do (eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, socialize when lonely, grab clicker when in the mood for TV time). Then, if things are not seeming to go as needed (food, hydration, hygiene), step in and help with that. The amount of gadgetry items I’ve ordered to help with this autonomy has made my Amazon order list look schizophrenic. Along with sunscreen, the majority of products are made for easing the moments of aging: shower chair, walker, giant digital clock, giant-buttoned landline phone that rings so loudly I imagine his neighbors try and answer their own. Oh, and then there’s that hummingbird feeder, which currently hangs on his balcony. Maybe the birds are flocking when we’re not looking? We’re still waiting.

As they arrive, I always have high hopes that they’ll do the trick. The automated pill case that beeps and lights up when it’s time to take a dose. Yeah. No. Failure. The beep just kept on beeping every half hour for, I don’t know, forever, and he ignored it. So thanks, Am-Z, for your easy return policy. Today a digital clock that talks is arriving. There is a function where you can record messages that will serve as reminders for things like pill-taking and food-getting/dining-room going. Dennis is going to use his smooth voice to record them, which I think is great given my connection to being the taskmaster is becoming too close for comfort.

This of course brings me to loving fiercely. Sometimes in the Hey, Dad, How About [fill in the blank with a thing I think needs doing] conversation, I feel a bit of my mom come through. A layer of intensity and panic that serves literally zero people. My dad passes me a look and we both know who the shadow person is in the room. I’m instantly uncomfortable with that. As previously written about, in cleaning out his place I came across so many examples of our bond to each other. How as his daughter and he as my dad, we communicated by encouraging each other in our art and in our lives. We’ve been proud of each other in those ways you do when there’s admiration. Not totally unconditional given he is my dad after all. But the belief in free movement was certainly present. I’m aware that by entering too deeply into the management of his life right now that I risk stripping him of the dignity his remaining autonomy brings. So as I figure out what he can do and where I can help, then let him figure out what he wants to do as I step back, I’m also reminded that the time I’ll be giving myself can go toward my creativity. That’s been simmering back-burner style for a while now. Not gonna lie to you, that actually scares the be-Jeezuz out of me. If I’m honest, I see that focusing on all things dad over the last many months has also been a defense against going fully into my own stuff: creative and otherwise.

So, er, stuff, here I come. Alert to the smell of smoke but not setting any fires.

For my dad, every day is Sunday. Not figuratively. Literally. I see him, he says, “today’s Sunday, right?” Occasionally it’s Tuesday. It’s definitely never Monday. And good for him, I think. Why not every day be whatever you want it to be? A weekday is really just a container that holds schedules. Stuff we have to do. Stuff we get to do. Something learned at a young age that brings some order to the on&on of it.

The learned stuff is wild. How it can start to loosen its fingers when the brain/soul/emotional engine gets tired of holding onto things that used to be second nature. Used to serve a purpose. Whether that’s because of time whittling it away or just a realization that some bits of scaffolding got built that don’t really need to be there anymore. Somewhere along my early unpaved roads, I decided that the little red wagon I hitched onto my life would need to hold everything I’d ever need to take care of anyone I ever loved. Because it was essential that I should always be the one to take care of whatever anyone would ever need or want. I would be there at the ready with the tools to, if not fix it, at least make it better by distraction or humor.

It’s not like that emotional carry-all didn’t serve me. It absolutely did. I remember when I understood just how handy it was as I stood outside the bedroom door listening to my mom crying on the other side. At twelve, I could rummage through what I was carrying, find what I felt was a solution (make dinner, tell a joke, slide a hankie under the door, not cause any trouble), then feel proud that I’d taken care of the situation. I was there. The only one who could do it. Over the years, the wheels of that little red wagon went round and round, grooving into my psyche so that fifty years later I don’t even hear it squeak.

Well, that’s a lie actually. Over the last little while, I’ve noticed the thing has become much more difficult to maneuver. Heavier. It’s run over my toes a few times and I’m starting to see it’s getting in the way. Not rolling smoothly but becoming a tripping hazard. The I’ve-got-just-the-thing-here-in-my-wagon reason for its being made me feel safe, competent, solid for a very long time. Any inkling of exhaustion made me tighten my grip rather than loosen it. Brought thoughts that I just needed to get stronger to pull the thing along.

Letting go of the grip has occurred to me before for sure (I’m looking at you, therapists) yet I’ve only dabbled in the quick-release, then grabbed hold again because I’ve grown accustomed to how that handle feels, the smooth bits where my fingers fit, and the weight of what it holds. And while I’ve also understood the hindrance of it, I’ve never seriously for any length of time thought about letting it go altogether. Sometimes I’ve been embarrassed about it and thought that by throwing some shiny covering on top I could disguise it. I doubt that’s ever worked. This is the first time I’ve introduced it to the public in large part because I feel more ready than I have been before to really call it what it is. Exhausting. Not necessary in its current form.

I say I want my dad to thrive in this new place that’s set up for him to do just that. And I’ve been showing up every day to make sure of it. But wait a minute. If I show up every day, how is that allowing him to find his way? I mean, sure, he loves to hang out with me and me with him but what about all those other very excellent folkx who wave and say “Hey, Dean. Good to see you” when we’re going for a walk? Margarate, the neighbor who delivers his paper every morning and worries that he’s getting overcharged for getting two on Sundays; Alan, who loves the Dodgers and genuinely engages with my dad on the topic when he sees him; Mitch and Judy who’ve invited him to sit with them many a time when we’ve passed the dining room, and on and on like that. And what if he doesn’t want to engage? Isn’t that his choice? Yes, clearly. Then why is there some rummaging in my mental wagon that pops up with NO, it’s up to me to decide for him. Feck, that thing just banged me in the shin. Hard.

As I dropped him off in the dining room for lunch last week, for the first time just escorting him in without staying, pointing out various tables with people sitting while I asked, Do you want to join them? and him saying, No, I’ll sit here and let someone join me,” I walked out feeling like I’d just dropped my kid off at school, my insides screaming “Oh-mi-gawd, I hope someone sits with him.” I called Dennis who reminded me that sure, maybe someone would sit with him, but if no one did then my dad would no doubt look around and watch people while still enjoying his meal. Or he’d feel lonely. Either way, that would be his choice.

Finding the balance between loving someone fiercely while understanding there’s no way to protect them from everything and that, in fact, it’s no good to always be there, one hand on their arm. That will only mean their stand-on-their-own muscle will atrophy and my balance will become fakakta as well. No good for anyone. So my shadow wagon. What of it? I can thank it for being there, maybe lift a few things off the top that I know can still serve me, then release the brake and let the thing roll on down the hill. Bye-bye.

(Naturally after writing that last line my first thought was Oh, crap, what if it hits something or flattens a valuable this-or-that? Fer fux sake, even my letting-go reflex has knee-jerk catastrophizing tendencies, which of course I knew already. So: the wagon rolls into a nice pond, floats around for a while, and all the fish circle with curiosity. That is all. Time to step away and take a walk.)

When I was a young tyke, I’d stay with my grandma Blanche (dad’s mom) for at least a week during summer vacations. One of my more durable memories from that time was sitting in front of the television at night, each of us behind our own tray table with a TV dinner set on top. A highlight was picking which dinner I wanted (I’m looking at you Swanson’s Salsbury Steak or enchilada combo situation), then climbing into the armchair facing whatever summer replacement show happened to be our favorite at that moment, then noshing and watching side by side. The one I remember most: The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show, which was holding space for the Sonny and Cher show since they apparently deserved the kind of summer-off span that I was enjoying. (Entertaining and fourth grade are no doubt really similarly taxing.) My grandma and I would sit in our highly upholstered floral chairs, mine with a throw pillow on the seat so I could reach my tray and I’d follow her lead on when to laugh or hmm or exclamicate. Once dinner and the show were over, climbing down would commence. This would require some gymnastics though I always remember doing it on my own, and being proud of my self-sufficiency.

My grandpa Emmer was still alive although living in a place called the Four Palms Convalescent Hospital, which is now called the Centinela Skilled Nursing & Wellness Centre West (I know that because I just looked it up). It exists in my memory bank as somewhere grim. Even though I don’t think I ever stepped through the door of the place while he lived there. The only memory I have is of sitting in the backseat of our car, my parents in the front talking about which of them would be escorting him out of the decades-long home he’d shared with my grandma and escorting him to the new place. I found a letter in a lockbox while cleaning out my dad’s—because there’s always a lockbox*—from the place to my grandma in 1974 that they’d raised the monthly cost. I was 13 years old at that point and thinking he was there and had been for years and that I never was taken to visit makes me extraordinarily sad. I don’t remember thinking that he was even alive. I don’t remember thinking about him at all after a certain age.

I do remember loving him. And that when we were together, he was fully present, which I see from photos and home movies. There we are splashing in the pool at the house in Palm Springs where we’d go for family vacations, showing him my dolls at Christmas, staring at him while he cleaned his pipe. I have a very strong memory of being eight-or-so, sitting on a bar stool in between him and my dad looking back and forth while sipping a Shirley Temple and staring at the snails in front of me that they were stabbing with small forks and eating. I tried one and remember the rubbery chewiness and the garlic butter and soaking that up with bread. (Apparently, the experience was so enjoyable that later, when I saw a snail in our back garden, I picked it up and was about to pop it into my mouth when my mom, in a split-second reaction around how to stop this from happening, turned the hose on me. I still do eat the odd escargot though.)

I have only a rudimentary sense of how my dad felt about his dad. We’ve talked about him a lot. What he did for a living and how he’d wanted to move to New Orleans, which in the end was overruled for LA so they could be close to my dad who’d left Moline, IL, where they’d all lived to come west for art school. As passionate as my dad gets about his parents has to do with his thoughts around his mom being the boss of the family. But even when I pay a lot of attention to his face or tone of voice when we talk about Emmer, there’s very little emotion there. In photos my dad seems present yet not overly so. It’s really hard to tell. And when I was young, he never talked about his parents. They were either always there or not at all. No talk of great-aunts or great-uncles (only because of that lockbox have I discovered I had any). We seemed to be an independent spaceship shedding various outer casings as we shot farther away from familial earth and I, for one, didn’t even notice. An only child of only children.

When I think of my grandpa alone in those final years I am crying. I am envisioning a bed in a room with other people. I’m feeling the isolation, the strangeness. I’m imagining smells and sounds that suggest a hospital where the point is to just keep someone breathing. I’m making that up given I never saw for myself, but yet, that’s how I understand those places to be back then. (Scroll to 1960s/1970s here.) Currently, looking in on my dad and seeing his one-bedroom decorated with his Eames chair and his art, watching him sit and stare, it’s hard for me to not make up a story that he is sad or lonely. And maybe he is. But maybe he isn’t. When asked the question, he says he’s good. Not bored. Just fine. He hasn’t made any moves to get to know the people on the other side of his door, down the hall in the community area or the dining room (even though I kind of have and in future posts will look forward to telling some stories with them as players because the ones I’ve met are a kick in the ass). But I can’t make that connection happen for him. That’s for him to do as they reach out and introduce. My role is to love him and hang out with him as daughters will do. To take care of him inasmuch as I can make some things easier. But ultimately, just like me being proud of climbing down out of my chair after TV dinners with my grandma, I feel fairly certain that he still has the self-sufficiency to launch up and out of his chair in order to make his way to a place where he is self-sufficient in whatever way that means for him.

* Looking forward to telling lockbox stories in future.

It was the shoes that got me. Well, the photos too. But really the shoes. Cleaning out and boxing up the last of the items at #277 (my dad’s former place that we’re readying for the sell) having already set up his new place with the necessary creature comforts, I was gathering up the doo-das for donation. And these: a pair of golf shoes, the left one with cleats, the right without (?maybe that’s a thing?); a pair of penny loafers that he began to spontaneously wear again last summer even though the soles were slippery as F so I retired them to the back of the closet; two pairs—one black, one brown—of shiny lace-up dress shoes—or rather they would be shiny once the layers of dust were removed, suggested a time. If their tongues could wag, I’ve no doubt they’d tell of days on many golf courses all over Southern California, of wanders through bookstores like Vroman’s, and a lot of sit-downs at Monty’s Steakhouse with his buddies and martinis and slabs of meat and salty fries. Somehow the visions of how his feet were covered as he walked through those bits of life moved me in a way I didn’t expect. Because they told me stories of who he was. Because they reminded me of who he is today. Still that guy but now with grippy, rubber-soled black canvas slip-ons that are, frankly, challenging to get on because of edema.

Today he is a guy who eats pretzels out of his coffee carafe, slips donuts under the sink, stuffs the phone in his glasses case, and wants the portable phone to turn on his TV. And none of this is an experiment or a lifestyle choice. Well, actually, it is a lifestyle choice although one made in a way that makes sense only in his world. A place where he toggles between frustration in acknowledging that he really doesn’t know how to do the things he once did and often wanders around his new place shaking his head, and another in which he sits and looks around him without much movement. I’m well aware of how lucky I am to know him in every stage of life from now and all the way back to my first memories of him and me reading in the den or him watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus while I tried to figure out what was so funny.

Currently, I’m almost constantly gnawing on worry that he’s OK in his twilight world while also served with a side of relief that he is surrounded now by people who can help him if/when he needs it. I wonder when to just let him be. To give him the autonomy to make his way to the dining room on his own (WITH. HIS. WALKER. Which he despises so far and I suspect will not take without reminding/forcing). When to stop showing up every day to set up the coffee machine and share a meal with him. I’m not sure I ever actually have to stop that but I do know from some conversations with people who work at his new place that at some point he’ll need to do some stuff like eating independently of me. Like when a parent(s) decides a child can walk on their own. How do you know? Is it when the bruising on his face from his fall makes him less self-conscious? Or now, when he can compare notes with his neighbors about their various and sundry moments of life?

And the DadCam we’ve set up in his apartment is, while helpful for sure given he fell again last week and I saw it happen and so Dennis and I could get there to help even though he was amazed at how we knew he needed help getting up since he doesn’t know about the camera, which I feel slightly guilty about altho not that guilty…but I digress. The DadCam is weird because I tune in every once in a while and see him sitting, napping, eating said pretzels out of the coffee carafe, trying to turn on the TV with the phone, things like that, and my instinct is to call and say “The remote is directly to your right on the table.” But I don’t do that because I’m rooting for him to figure it out. And if he doesn’t, he doesn’t. I can’t know what he’s thinking. I can make up that he’s sad or despairing or other dark things but I can’t know that at all. And watching him sit and stare off into space I could just as easily imagine he’s thinking about and reliving happily walking on the golf course in his cleat (or non-cleat) white shoes on the back nine. Or hanging at Monty’s bar with his pals after the game as they talk of their day. Or strolling through the bookstore aisles choosing his next book to take home and sit in his Eames chair to read. He’s sitting in his Eames chair right now (yes, I just looked). He’s holding the paper, maybe reading it. But overall none of that matters. He’s in a whole different space right now and it’s one only he knows. He’s wearing black canvas slip-ons with very grippy soles, which are resting on the black leather footrest. And in a few hours those shoes will accompany him and me on a walk around his new property where we’ll say hi to the neighbors.

Hello! Let’s talk cassette players, cassette tapes, and how they enabled the world go round&round back in a day when although things weighed on me, they were weighted so incredibly differently. More fleeting freakouts than existential glimpses into mortality.

I think I mentioned that as I go through and clean out the things in my dad’s former home as we ready it for selling, that the places those items take me, the memories they evoke, tumble me down the rabbit hole of my heart. (And speaking of tumble, he is making a steady recovery from the one he took last week. Although his face is bruised all over as if he’s wearing a superhero’s mask of blacks and purples and the cut on his arm still requires two sterile pads and a good wind-around of self-adhesive wrap once a day, overall things are moving in the healing direction. He still toggles between the tunes: “I’m checking out of this place” and “I live here now and maybe itt’s OK” yet he hums along more often to the latter than the former. So…progress.) As to the music of life, it was his collection of cassettes that did me in during last week’s sorting session.

A zippered case holding handmade cassettes copied from his collection of jazz albums. Count Basie, Stan Kenton, Sarah Vaughn, Blue Note live recordings, and Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. These artists and their tunes were the soundtrack to my young life. I don’t know if I loved jazz exactly but I recognized as I toddled around our house, then grew into my own set of ears, that it had an edge that the pop music on the car radio didn’t. When my mom drove me to school or when we did errands or if I went with her to her Saturday hair appointment, KHJ was always tuned in. It was LA’s pop station, 93 on the AM dial, and it was where I learned that my mom liked to sing, that she had an amazing voice, and that who cared what the lyrics were. Elton John (“Rocket Man”: “Burning down the street my friend lives on”) came in for particular whizzy-do-ing and it wasn’t until I became addicted to reading lyrics and liner notes did I realize her imagination for rewrites. I also had some funny ideas about what was going on in the Guess Who’s “She’s Come Undone” deciding the story was about a kangaroo. I don’t know. Don’t even ask.

So anyway, I came undone when I came across my dad’s cassette collection last week. It took me back to places in time to my own memories of music, when it was my lifeline. My first cassette tape, Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic played in my first car, a blue VW Bug. I wore the F out of that tape. It did snag and catch and finally all the tape came off the little rollie wheels and I had to cut the thing out of the machine. I had my first kiss in that car while that cassette was rolling. I don’t remember the guy but I do remember the song, “Round and Round.” Kind of a slow grind for 5+ minutes…the song, not the kiss. There was nothing like driving the three blocks to my high school with a cassette blasting (Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, Heart’s Little Queen), a cigarette in my left hand, elbow on the ledge of the unrolled window. I’d only really get through two-ish tunes but the importance of pulling into the parking lot with the right one blasting so (insert name of current crush material who was probably too stoned to focus on where the sound was coming from) would notice was crucial.

Then the college years and mixed tapes. How they wound and spooled pure love. The insane amounts of human hours that were spent picking the right songs for a 60-minute experience that was meant to A) show how cool I was (the B-side of a Roxy Music import recorded in Japan?? Who. Are. You?) B) tell the story of my soul that I now choose to share with you, most-excellent recipient of this tape (Bryan Ferry’s “Jealous Guy”, The Pretenders “Brass in Pocket”, The Smiths “Reel Around the Fountain“), and C) capture a snapshot of the time (wasn’t it amazing when we saw Charles Bukowski in the college bar? Don’t all these songs remind you of how drunk we got, like in a good way?). And then those tapes would get given, copied and passed, threading us all together, creator and recipient, on the waves of each song. There was always an excruciating moment of waiting to hear back about whether someone thought the tape was revolutionary or rubbish.

Then the NYC years and the Walkman, an invention of pure joy. My most magical memories of walking the twelve blocks (four cross, 14 up) from my apartment on 14th street between Avenues B&C to the SPIN offices in the 20’s off Broadway while listening to the advance tapes I’d gotten from various record companies. Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Metallica’s Metallica, Hole’s Pretty on the Inside, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Babes in Toyland, and on and on. I’m not sure my feet touched the ground during this footfall commute. I do know that I felt like a badass. I was cocksure about being the only person on this stretch of sidewalk listening to this particular set of songs and that maybe I’d even be the one to introduce it to people in the magazine’s pages so that in a month or so when the album came out, folx could buy it. But mainly I just felt joy and power. To be able to be plugged in and traveling through the world with the music I loved pouring into my head because of this whirling machine on my hip. Nothing better, this freedom.

I still have those advance cassette tapes worn dangerously thin but perhaps still playable and since the Rocket has a tape deck I just might be the one driving (the speed limit) on the way to see my dad, window cranked, arm propped on the rolled-down window (sans cigarette), making up the lyrics to some of the songs that changed my life. “A potato, an amigo, a mosquito stole my speedo.”

I had such a different idea for this writing today. One thought was to focus on all the characters my dad and I have met at his new place over the last almost-two weeks. Danny&Fanny and Mitch&Judy (who I’d brought up in last week’s post), Char&Ernie, Billie&Kennie(her dog), Ethel&Fargo(her dog), Norma, Wayne, Sarah, Helen, Marilyn, etc. Or maybe I was going to write about the ongoing emptying of his old place where I found all my second- and third-grade composition notebooks up in the closet, then lost it because two things hit me at once: He was the one who kept all my stuff and he was the age I am now (give-or-take) when he decided to put all these albums and what-have-you up on this shelf. A vibrant man on his way to mix a martini, set a tee time, or pick up a book by his favorite author (TC Boyle or Annie Proulx).

So those were the topics kicking around in my head. Then he fell, hit his and everything turned: the topic, time, the temperature in my body. Dennis and I had been deciding on what to have for dinner when Golden Oaks called and told me he’s fallen in the hallway on his way back from dinner and that one of the care team nurses was tending to him in his apartment. She said, “I didn’t call 911 but he hit his head and scraped himself up pretty badly.”

Because we’d installed a tiny camera in his place yesterday, I was able to tune in and see Odina, the care nurse, patching him up. When I called his place and she answered, she said she was just trying to stop the bleeding.

Adrenaline is a thing I’m really so well acquainted with in the last few months. I fly on it. I recognize the sound of it, the blood rush in my ears, a bit tinny. The constant motion of my fingers worrying whatever piece of clothing I’m wearing. Last night, as Dennis was driving, I’m pretty sure that the one area of my t-shirt’s hem that I worked over and over in the passenger seat for the 20-minute drive might be a smooth spot that will always remind me of that stretch of goddamned, traffic-choked, rush-hour Cali freeway as the sky turned dark and I just didn’t know what to do with my mind. That crazy combination of helpless and urgent.

So, yes, on the one hand, it’s turned out OK in that he didn’t break a bone. He has a black eye from a bump and abrasion above his right eye, a scratch on his shoulder, peeled-back skin on his arm, scab on his knee. He looks startling but he said he wasn’t in pain (and still says it today) so that’s good too. He says his ego’s bruised. Well, sure, but more than that, as wise people have told me, my moment is to figure out how can I help him help himself. As I’ve turned into the person who patches him up much as he did when I needed it.

The other things that are turning are the wheels on his walker. We took it for a run around the building today. He’d been resistant (because, ya know, of course he has). He’d decided it belonged to Dennis given he was the one to bring it over and show him how it works. There is a new sign on his door, eye-level, outgoing, “Take Your Walker” (maybe there’s an exclamation point). He sees that 96.5% of everyone there has one. We’re trying to get him excited on the kind of flair he might attach to it…rainbow streamers for the handlebars may not be his jam, maybe a picture of Duke Ellington laminated on the front. Who knows. First, though, to roll. To roll with the situation, to stop staring at the security cam (he’s currently watching a Dodger game in his fave chair. OK, OK, I’m closing the app), to turn toward some breathing and to know I can’t stop the flood of feelings but instead give us the tools to succeed. Whatever that looks like for the both of us.

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.

Cotton swabs and pillowcases. My dad has an abundance of those things. Some (me?) might say an overabundance. He has two ears and two sets of sheets. Those ears may potentially be extremely clean when laid upon an ever-changing array of pillow coverings. I discovered this over the last week while quietly cleaning out various drawers and cabinets in preparation for his Monday move. Quietly because I was doing this work while he napped in his favorite chair, which gave me the span of afternoons to move things into the Rocket 88 for relocation or into the trash bin for recycling, etc. There was a novel that came out last year(?) about a woman who moves her belongings out of the house she shares with her husband and child so incrementally that they never notice until one day she’s entirely gone. Erased from where she’d once been. I wish to G-D I could remember the name of it so I could link, then read, it. (If anyone knows, please post in the comments.) Any-ways, I feel a little like that’s what’s happening under my dad’s nose, except he’s actually the one soon surrounded by new walls.

I very stealthily crept out the door taking bags of toilet paper (another thing he has a lot of … pandemic leftovers?) and paper towels but also the right side of a closet that held sports coats much like the ones in the photos above and below. Navy blue was a favorite but also camel and a houndstooth one as well. Very 70s and 80s. Still in good condition. Dusty but a reminder of his dapper style. One I’ve known so well that belies the fact he’s been wearing the same pair of sweatpants for a solid week now. And then there are hats, one that he wore at my wedding back in 2000 that’s still in beautiful shape even as that marriage dissolved almost 15 years ago. A hat he bought in NY on a trip when it was very extremely cold because it was December. A fuzzy knit number that I recently pulled out and put on his noggin a couple of months ago after he’d mistakenly(?) turned off the heat in his apartment and I’d found him freezing and shaking and put him back to bed with that hat on his head so he’d get warm. Then there is the Sherlock-style cap with ear flaps that maybe I bought him on a trip to the UK a place I know he’d always wanted to visit but never has. All of those have made the trip to the new place. None of them will be noticed missing in this particular moment.

There was also the stuff found inside drawers that told stories. The wand-like cat toy in the bedside table that belonged to his tabby, Agatha, who died almost 10 years ago. The plastic handle chewed on as if once the thing had been waved around sufficiently, it was then dropped on the ground for her to just play with it on her own because he probably had a martini to mix or a book to read. All the name tags from when he worked at the Yucaipa golf course, those early morning hours when he’d go out on the green and shoo away the geese, make sure the starting times were set for the first foursomes to get the day started. The place they called him Dean-o. He also has a lot of sunglasses. Well, I have a lot of sunglasses too, so maybe that’s just a Spencer thing. There are shoes he’ll not wear again. There’s a fancy Parisian bathrobe, which I packed up and hung in his new closet because why not? And a lot of ties. Wide ties all. I recognize many of them from pictures and dinners out with him. If they could talk there would be stories of golf tournaments, jazz clubs, dates of all sorts. I’m all ears. Cotton swabs notwithstanding.

Now, I’m off to quietly rediscover more moments in his life although today we’re sitting on the porch and I’ll ask questions rather than read into hidden treasures.