mental tsunami

“It’s gotten so I can’t tell whether it’s real or unreal. When I go to bed, I can’t tell if I’m awake or asleep. Yesterday I had all these colored circles, small and bigger, going around and around,” Dad says, as soon as I walk in the door.

I sneeze. “Have you done that all of your life?” Dad wants to know. “Yes.” “What is that called, anyway?” “Sneezing,” I tell him.

Dad and I are having the blindness conversation AGAIN and it’s driving me crazy. I’m summoning all the patience I can find, and I know that it must be horrifying to not just go blind once, but to have the experience of going blind over and over again, but I am SO tired of this conversation.

It doesn’t help that it’s hot. It was over 80 degrees today, really too hot to bake, but I had promised Dad a blueberry pie, so I turned the oven on. He has an irrational fear of getting cold – even now, he’s wearing a sweatshirt – so he won’t consider getting an air conditioner. It’s going to be a hot, repetitive summer.

Eeeeeeeek!!!!! Dad just asked me to have sex with him. He said, “do you think we can strip our clothes off and make it?” I’m telling myself “Don’t freak out. He doesn’t know who I am. It’s not his fault, it’s his brain malfunctioning. Just calmly say no and move on.” I hope he doesn’t make this a habit!

And now he’s back to asking questions about my mother. To him, that whole exchange was just a couple of sentences, not the mental tsunami it created for me.

Dad hears a horse from Central Park clopping down the street – his house is on the way to the stable. He begins musing on the lives of the carriage horses. “They don’t work hard,” he says, “they don’t run, but they probably get bored, doing the same thing over and over. That’s what gets them.”