Heading out of the house today, I ran into my neighbor, Mrs. Hickey, who is in her 70s. When I tell her I’m going to see Dad, she asks how he is. I don’t want to get into a long story, so I just tell her he’s having difficulty because of his blindness. This strikes a chord with her because her husband has become blind during the past few years. She starts talking to me, caregiver to caregiver, about how she feels tied down because she has to be back at a certain time to fix her husband’s lunch. I certainly know how she’s feeling, and then I feel weird because I seem to have more in common with this elderly Irish lady than some of my own peers.

“Last night I had a weird, weird, weird dream,” Dad tells me. “It woke me up. I didn’t have any money at all and they were banging on the door, ‘get out of here!’ and then the banging stopped and I woke up and sat up straight. The bedclothes were all tangled up, it was a mess.” It’s strange, I think, that he can’t remember things in his waking life, but he can remember dreams.

I make Dad breakfast, because he doesn’t know whether he’s eaten or not, but he says he’s hungry. Dad pauses mid-omelette and waves his left arm through the air from top to bottom and back again, several times. “What are you looking for?” I ask. “I was just finding out where I was,” he answers.

Brianna has acquired a new Dad-name – this time he called her “a lively cat.”

I put Dad on the phone with Kate S. “I just came from the shithouse,” he tells her.

Dad’s burping again, and today I know he hasn’t had any soda. I wonder if I should take him to the doctor.