Mineral Point (Part 6)

When I moved from Seattle to the farm I moved into the Barn with a duffle bag of clothes and a laptop made in 1995 that my dad had bought my sister when she started college, the best valued laptop of its day, no doubt. Amy accompanied me on my drive back across the country. With Joel I first drove down to California to meet Amy and had a weekend somewhere in Napa valley at a rented house with Amy's friends and our friends. Amy and I then drove down to Oakland and picked up a mattress from her place and delivered it to her parents in Los Angeles. From there we drove to Mineral Point, stopping in Arizona and Colorado, making it a trip. 

When we arrived in Mineral Point the first thing we did was go to dinner at a new brewery in town with my dad and our old family friend Ted and his sons, Matt and my oldest friend Adam. At dinner my dad acted strange. It was the first time I had seen him for about nine months and though I had been talking to him every week it was clear that he was not able to track our conversation. Ted watched me as I learned first hand that my father was not himself and gently stepped in as needed, someone who had experience being around this new version of my father. When we got back to the farm and Amy and I went up to the Barn was suddenly overcome with emotions and I cried while Amy hugged me, perhaps just then realizing what I was doing and realizing that after tomorrow Amy would no longer be there and it would just be me, my dad, and Susan in a somewhat isolated countryside compound. Perhaps I was just tired or perhaps I was disappointed that my dad didn't really acknowledge that I was there at dinner, already lost in another world.

Me being there allowed Susan to relax a bit and not worry too much about my dad getting into trouble. At that point she was still teaching elementary school in a nearby town and needed to go to work during the day. I was tasked with very little by Susan other than to watch after my dad and to see if I could sell my dad's 94 Mazda MPV. Its ten-disc CD player was broken such that it played the same track over and over, "Somewhere over the Rainbow" by the Hawaiian singer Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwoʻole. There was no way to change the settings other than to turn it off. Every button broken, including the button to eject CDs. You couldn't even switch it to the radio. The only thing one could do was to turn it off. My dad, however, didn't notice that it was repeating or at least didn't seem to mind. When I arrived in the Spring he was still driving, though only really driving around town. This worried Susan and part of selling the car was really to get the vehicle off the property so he couldn't drive, which she wisely predicted would eventually get him into trouble. An account of that time I wrote ten plus years ago,

He used my blue truck to drive down to the mechanic and check on the status of his vehicle. It was early and I kept sleeping until the phone rang, the mechanic asking me to bring the fire chief's truck back. Confused I looked out the window to see my dad pulling up in a tan truck. After returning the tan truck and bringing back my own, I scolded him and barred him from driving my truck ever again. 

My dad loved cars. Not new cars but all cars, always reading about them in Consumer Reports, trying to find the best car with the best value. When we were younger, probably on a Friday after picking us up, we'd drive around farm equipment lots and used car lots near Dodgeville. It was unclear what exactly he was looking for but was always looking. He often traded in one used car for another, suddenly and surprisingly showing up in a vehicle none of us had ever seen before. During my senior year of college one day he was supposed to pick me up. It was late on a Friday and he was late. I was sitting in my dorm room and kept hearing a car alarm outside. Eventually I got up and went into the hall way where one of the jock types who lived down the hall informed me that there was a guy in the parking lot asking for me. I went out to find my dad in a white Nissan Ultima sitting in the driver's seat trying to turn the alarm off. Somehow we turned it off and drove back to Wisconsin. This was a year after he was diagnosed, a year before I went back to Mineral Point. Instances like these were frequent while he was still in the nebulous zone of post diagnosis and pre-institutionalization. He knew he was getting worse but could still almost go about his business. He traded in the Nissan for the MPV and wanted to trade in the MPV for a Toyota Rav4. This never happened.