On the upper-floor of the Barn there was a wood burning stove. It wasn't essential since the Barn had central-heating, but sometimes in the winter my dad would fire it up, just for effect. The black cast iron stove was set close to West facing wall and a shiny metal stove pipe ran up from the exhaust, through a portion of the exposed ceiling, then bent at 90 degrees, extended, and exited through that wall. One morning that Spring I heard a clunking, waking me up. It kept happening and I got up to look for where the noise was coming from, something to do with the stove. I couldn't imagine what it was. Maybe a branch had blown into the chimney and was banging around in the wind. I went and got my dad who assessed the situation and began dismantling the stove pipe, taking it apart near the elbow. A bird flew out of the pipe, small enough to have found its way down the chimney. A chickadee is normally grey and white with a black beak and head, a touch of tan on its sides but this one was all black and covered in soot. We opened the window and shooed it out.
**
One morning my dad came up the steps. It was a little bit before seven. The Barn's steps were simple wooden steps, slightly wide, slightly deep, and not too steep. The trudge up the stairs echoed in the empty rafters and so one would always be warned that someone was coming. He had gone to Wal-Mart that morning and bought the movie Gladiator on DVD to watch with me. That meant that he left the farm before six, drove to Dodgeville, bought the movie when Wal-Mart opened, and then come back to share it with me. I was sleeping. He was excited and I felt bad to tell him that I wanted to sleep a bit more and asked if we could watch the movie later. Or the time I was in college, a sophomore, and he called at five in the morning just to chat. Dementia messes with one's sense of time, the rhythms of the day, what's appropriate and when, to whom.
**
One morning he came up the stairs with a copy of the day's Wisconsin State Journal. I was sleeping. He was excited and started to read the headline but stumbled over the words and stopped. He tried another headline and the same thing happened. I sat up and asked him what was going on, why he was reading me the newspaper, if something had happened. At that moment he seemed to realize that I was sleeping or trying to sleep and left me to it. 2008, a poem-like thing:
An alarm clock is one way to wake up. There are others, like gradually, with the sun rising in the East, to be shook awake by your step brother, or by you mother in the early early morning. To be sleepy until one jumps in the water; to sit on the warm grate while the freezing cold festers. Mornings like these.
I could wake up from the sound of a garbage truck, from the need to pee, a dream where I'm looking for the bathroom, an elbow touching mine. I could wake up from voices, a roommate or a couple walking by, a bright afternoon sun and the sudden feeling of sloth. I could wake up because I'm cold, wander through a house looking for blankets until someone else's parent hands me one. I could wake up in a tent, to rain, or wake up on a train going south, on my way to Los Angeles. I could wake up with drool on my pillow, with a boner or with a crick in my neck. I could wake up with the realization I've been sleeping on a wadded up t-shirt, dreaming that a biker had just stabbed me in a ballet studio. I could wake up with a dream in my head or a Stereolab song and listen to it on my way to work.
I could wake up from the a-tonal hum of a tea pot, in a panic, in a sweat of anxiety about teaching and work. I could wake up as a wire strung between fence posts, humming or laughing at a joke in a dream, goofing with friends. I could wake up in a foreign country, in a closet converted into a bedroom, look at the wall and not know where I am, a single moment stretching out in my memory. I could wake up to my father trying to read a newspaper headline, or a bird trapped in the stove pipe. I could take a nap and wake up twice in a day, wake up sick, and wonder what it feels like to not feel sick, shake Tony and wake up from the dream. I could wake up to a friend's voice wishing me a good day, wake up to my own voice wishing him good luck.
Or the time that Spring my friend Molly had come out to visit for the weekend from Iowa, where she was finishing up her senior year. We were sitting in the Barn, talking and figuring out what we were going to do that day and my dad came up the stairs with two tennis rackets wanting to play. I said something like, "Dad, Molly is visiting. We're going do stuff in town. Let's play after she leaves." And he got upset, saying that I was always busy and didn't have time for him. Reacting to his sudden anger, I asserted again that we'll play when Molly leaves, forcefully and with a look on my face, an angry bird. It was embarrassing and unfamiliar. It was like I was scolding him, as if I was the parent and he was the child. Driving away from the farm I spoke to Molly, saying, see, this is the situation. It's strange, a cliché, and I don't know what to do with him, that he is not quite my father as I knew him and therefore I am not quite the son I know to be.
**
It was always difficult to communicate what was going on to everyone but for Susan and Ted and the folks he saw on a regular basis, folks that had seen the decline first hand. Even my brother and sister didn't quite grasp how quickly he was deteriorating. That Spring in DC, sitting in a Mexican restaurant waiting for our food I talked a little about what we were doing on the farm, that dad was getting bad and that if they're going to spend time with him they should do so soon. They responded with annoyance, not about my father but about me; that I, the baby and youngest child couldn't possibly say something that they didn't already know; that it was not my place to make recommendations or judgments. These pre-dementia family dynamics reasserting themselves, our defensive biases and habits shaping the means by which the present moment arrives, reaffirming again and again that it's not the ideas that matter but the ethos of the person presenting them.
My mom lived in Madison, about an hour from Mineral Point down the 151. My friends Aric and Aaron were still finishing their undergraduate degrees at the university, five-years to graduate as an engineer and I'd go into Madison on the weekends sometimes to see them, sleeping at my mom's house. She'd ask me how he was doing but I didn't quite know how to answer that. What I wanted was for her to ask me how I was doing. I wanted everyone to ask me that. I was mad at her for a long time after this period, an anger that I couldn't begin to articulate until years later. Being in Mineral Point and spending my days with my dad, no job, momentum, and somewhat isolated put me in a mood, a mood that followed me back to Seattle, then down to Portland and then to Providence at Brown for poetry school. It wasn't until the summer that I had graduated and started to see a good talk therapist twice a week with the last vestiges of my grad school health insurance that I came to realize how much that Spring had impacted me, how much a sense that I couldn't talk about those experiences had been fossilized.
Of course I could talk but most of the folks I knew didn't seem to relate to my experience, still mostly unknown even to myself. The early onset of my dad's dementia meant that the timeline was off, that in another twenty or so years I may have gotten a different reception though I'm skeptical that anyone can really understand another's hardship, whatever its nature. Though perhaps this sentiment merely demonstrates the particular strain of cynicism that lead to my silence in the first place, this cynicism a vestige of some mysterious civilization that had to fortify its walls against a long forgotten barbarian invader, its defensive encampment leftover from another era. But I could not blame my friends for not understanding my situation. I could not blame my mother who had her own issues with my father. I could not blame my sister and brother for living their East coast lives. And so I blamed myself for how I felt, that my mood was a result a directionlessness. That my loneliness was a result of my relationship with Amy. That missing my father, wanting to ask him for some advice, what to do, who to be; that this sense was a result of weakness, a fault of my own making. Like a sestina, kneading the dough,
There
is a connection between when I started to write, or at least become aware of
the desire that writing was something I wanted to do, and to my father's
illness. It's difficult to make this connecting explicit. There were times
during my sophomore year of college, before the diagnosis, when he would call
to chat at five in the morning, or appear unannounced at my dorm room on a
Tuesday afternoon, a long two hour drive from the farm. Later, watching him
fold laundry, each item, a t-shirt or a pair of socks was put into its own pile
so that the laundry room was completely covered in a single layer of neatly
folded clothes. Like reading a sentence so closely you forget the beginning
before you reach the end. "That's a good way of explaining it," my mother
told me over dinner.
I began to
think about the past and make revisions to my memory and the logic of events
growing up. There was a time in Seattle after I had come back from helping take
care of him, jobless and isolated in a moldy apartment, when I thought about
his disease and our relationship constantly. In retrospect I think this could
have been considered mourning, but I had nothing to show for it: no funeral or
artifact, no sign that anything real had happened.
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