Mineral Point (Part 8)

One thing my dad and I would do during that Spring was play tennis. Research on how to slow down dementia was pretty limited about twenty years ago but they had found that exercise helped, and so I bought a couple of rackets and some balls to hit around the courts down at Soldiers Park. This activity echoed things we'd do when we were all kids and dad would take us there in the summer evenings, after work. We'd play doubles, myself, brother, sister, and him and maybe then go have ice cream afterwards. It was fun then, and fun again, the most normal, non-dementia hindered activity that we could do together. As opposed to other activities that required us to interact with folks. Going to Pizza Hut and having my dad tell the waitress that he had dementia. Or Wal-Mart, again, my dad first asking a stranger where he was from and then telling him that he had dementia. He'd tell them, and then announce, proudly I suppose, that most folks couldn't tell that he had dementia. They'd respond to it the way one could respond to that kind of comment, with polite bewilderment. 

Or the time on the airplane in May that year, the last time he ever left Wisconsin when I accompanied him for a coordinated visit to see my sister in DC, staying in the old Georgetown house of the judge she was house sitting for. My brother had came down from New York to join us, the four of us together. Before getting on the plane in Madison my dad and I had bought a bag a cheese curds from Hooks, a famous cheese maker in Wisconsin. Or maybe Susan had given it to us for the plane ride. I don't remember. What I remember are two things: the way fresh cheese curds squeak when you bite them. Dad leaned over to the man sitting in the aisle seat and offered them a cheese curd and told them about the squeakiness of fresh cheese curds. That it only lasts for a day or two at the most. That's how you know they're fresh. These are fresh curds. Most folks have never really had fresh curds. And then he told them that he had dementia, that nobody would ever know if from the way that he behaved, and that he was on his way with his son to visit his daughter and his other son in DC. The man had a cheese curd and then talked with my dad for a while. Wished him good luck as he exited the plan. 

When we were kids dad paid an old man named Mr. Eckstein to give us tennis lessons. I think I only ever went to one of them, maybe two. Mr. Eckstein was quite old. He lived alone in the motel like little houses behind the Quicktrip. I didn't know much about him but he was pretty good at tennis. He played with a wooden racket and though he couldn't really move around the court, he'd just stand in the middle and hit the ball back no matter where we hit it from. He used to be a pro of some kind. He'd teach us how to grip the racket, how to swing with a straight elbow. Occasionally a string of drool would slip down from his cheeks and he'd slowly wipe his wrinkled hand across his bottom lip to catch it. At some point later, maybe about seven or so years, he fell and broke his hip and got put into an old folks home. One day my dad took me there to visit him. This was a thing my dad did, always talking about how important it was to visit people when they were alone or sick, how important it was to see your family, even if you didn't feel like going. We sat in Mr. Eckstein's room with the television on. I had nothing to say to him. At some point my dad wandered out and it was just him and I. We watched television. I might have been fourteen years old. My dad and I left and not too long after Mr. Eckstein died.  

I always wondered what my dad's relationship was with folks like Mr. Eckstein, how it came about that he gave us tennis lessons. Or rather, given my brother and sister tennis lessons. I wasn't really into tennis and I didn't have much of a relationship with Mr. Eckstein, not that I said this to my dad. Or my dad's relationship with an old lady named Florence that we'd go out to dinner with in Dodgeville on Mondays. I don't know who she was or why we spent so much time with her. She wasn't someone who watched after us kids and wasn't someone we were related to. She had a blue Chevy Nova hatchback that sat in her driveway and a police scanner what I'd ask to turn on if we had to sit in her quiet living room while her and my dad chatted about things I couldn't follow. She'd always laugh at something my dad said and say, "Ohhh, Bob" and a thick Wisconsin accent. I wonder what my dad was doing. Why we were there. Who these people were to him and if there was some plan as to what kinds of relationships he was trying to help us build. If he was acting as a kind of emissary of anti-loneliness. Always talking, driving around and talking to people. It was important, he'd insist. It's important to say hello.