rainbow pizza

I come back from the Dyke March and find Dad searching high and low for his cat. “She’s in her cat bed, Dad,” I tell him. She rarely moves, unless she’s coming out for food or toile on the couch. 15 year old cats aren’t that active. “Do you have any cats of your own?” he asks. “Yeah, 15, Dad,” I tell him. He’s startled. “15!! Whoo-hoo! You’re certainly cat conscious,” he says.

As I’m getting dinner together, he asks “What are you going to do about that?” “About what?” I ask. “About whatever you’re going to do? What are you going to do, anyway?” he asks, confusing both of us.

Dad and I are discussing the plans for tomorrow’s Pride parade and I’m trying to persuade him not to give me his last $20, in case he needs it for cab fare. “It costs more the farther you go along?” he asks. “In a cab, the farther you go, the more it costs,” I explain. “What about walking?” he wants to know. “Walking is free, Dad,” I tell him.

There’s a new dog in the neighborhood and it has a barking problem. “That thing, that animal, has been barking for hours now,” Dad tells me. “It’s a dog, Dad,” I say. “It’s a dog?” he says, sounding surprised.

I’m telling Dad about how it only poured during the time I was trying to get back to his house from the March and stopped as soon as I got indoors. “It’s crazy, the sky is all blue and pretty again,” I say to him. “What guy?” he asks, making me think of the Blue Man Group, who perform with their skin painted blue.

Dad is bored with the lack of variety in his pre-prepared meals. I tell him we can get take out and run through the options. When I get to pizza, I discover that it has disappeared from his memory banks. He starts asking me various questions about this item, reminding me of a creative writing exercise where you have to pretend that you are explaining everyday items to an outer space alien. One of his questions about pizza: “They come in various colors?” I wonder why not. They seem to put dye in pretty much everything else these days. Why not have a rainbow pizza?

a small but cat-happy control

Even though it was only 6pm when I got to Dad’s today, it was later than I usually get there (I was delayed by hunting for my damn ATM card), and he had given up on me and gone to bed. “I thought that this was the holiday and you were raising hell, so I went to bed,” he said. By “holiday” he means gay pride.

He had forgotten to eat the dinner that Marie left in the microwave, so once he got up, we sat down to eat. Lately, he’s been preceding meals with a countdown: “1, 2, 3, go!” and this time he shouted “go!” so loudly that he made himself cough, and then said, “I think I overdid that one.”

After talking to Kate S. on the phone, he asked me, “Is she ever going to get weightless?” causing mental images of Kate S. floating around his apartment.

Short on things to talk about, I wind up telling cat stories, like how my missing phone turned out to be under Tiger Lily. “Maybe there was some electronic thing that made the cat like it. You’d think that a lump, even a small lump, would be uncomfortable for the cat. It probably had a small but cat-happy control,” said Dad. That explains it! My phone has a built-in cat magnet – that’s why cats seem to magically find their way to me.

Then I told him about Mr. Wednesday and how he always wants to be let into or out of the bathroom. “Does he want to be in the bathroom to take a bath?” asked Dad, as though cats make a practice of walking into the bathroom, turning on the water, and settling in for a relaxing soak. My cats actually did turn on the water the other day, but they didn’t get in, just watched it run. “You have quite a cat life,” said Dad. “Do you plan to have more cats? Like, another 20?” he asked, in the politely inquiring done of someone asking a newlywed couple if they plan to have children. “No, Dad,” I answered and tried to explain – while laughing – that I didn’t plan the fifteen I have. “Are there professional cat-growers?” Dad asked. I tried to explain that animal shelters are professional organizations with large numbers of cats, but that they collect them rather than growing them.

“I’m harvesting strawberries in the garden,” I tell Dad. “Do you sell them?” he asks. “No,” I tell him. “I only have two a day.” “Two boxes?” he asked. “Two strawberries,” I explained. “I thought you might have a big field of them,” he said, leaving me wondering where in New York City one could have a big field of anything. “Strawberries are the most important berry in the world,” Dad declared.

Dad is reflecting on his overall health at age 85: “the doctor says ‘you’re one of the strangest persons. Everyone else gets sick and dies or gets eaten.’” Gets eaten?

I tell Dad that the brick guys are coming to start repairing my house tomorrow. “They’ll stop for the holiday,” he says. “Dad,” I say, “I don’t think they celebrate gay pride.”

Dad is exercising his neck by turning his head from side to side. When he stops, he says, “My neck is still grouchy.”

a big, big, big ass

Dad is trying to wipe the counter clean with his used napkin, just creating more of a mess. I hand him a damp paper towel. “Is this a new stunt? Half wet and half dry?” he asks.

On the phone, Kate S. tells him that she’s taking Kristen-the-cat to the vet tomorrow. The cat has been shaking her head too much and the veins inside her ear are bulging. When Kate S. tells Dad she might have to have surgery, he says “they’ll probably knock her out with the sauce.” He seems relieved to hear that it’s only her ear. He doesn’t admit it much, but he’s actually quite attached to the cat. When he first got her, he spent hours observing her and then calling me to report on her behavior, all of which was pretty routine cat activity.

Lately, Dad’s having trouble with his cigars. Since he has no depth perception, he has trouble lighting them - he holds the match half an inch or so too far from the end of the cigar. He gets them lit eventually, sometimes with my help. He has to light them more than usual, too, because his concentration isn’t good and he’ll get distracted by something and let the cigar go out in the ashtray. Today, he decided to smoke a second cigar, but somehow as he was taking off the cellophane, he wound up unpeeling the actual wrapper of the cigar and the whole thing fell apart in his hands. “It’s punishing me,” he said, meaning that this mishap was a consequence for having two cigars in one day. He’s smoking more than usual, just like he’s eating and drinking more than usual, because he doesn’t remember that he ate an hour before or smoked the day before.

Dad is studying my feet and ankles, which are propped up. Since my feet are very pale, they make a good contrast with their surroundings, and Dad can often see them, though he doesn’t always know what they are – he sometimes mistakes my feet for his white cat. Anyway, today he says, “Right now, it looks like a huge ass. A big, big, big ass. Bent way over and sticking up.”

Dad is pondering gender again. “Girls never have beards, do they?” he asks me. I’m not about to get into a complicated explanation of the circumstances under which some women grow facial hair, so I just give him a simple answer – “No, they don’t.”

a whole life, vanished

Yesterday we had an early Father’s Day celebration for Dad. I gave him a box of 25 cigars, and he was thrilled. He also really liked the ice cream cake, even though it didn’t get frozen through completely. I guess I should have started TWO days in advance.

While we were eating, he startled me by saying a sentence in Anglo Saxon – I haven’t heard him use Anglo Saxon in a year or more, but there it was. He used it so rarely before that I don’t think either Kate S. or Brianna had ever heard it and it’s an odd-sounding language, so they were pretty confused until I explained.

Kate S. took this picture of Dad in his festive leis, with her camera phone.

Going to Dad’s today was an exercise in self-discipline –it was pouring, what we call in my feline-centric household, “raining cats and more cats” and I was tired. But when I got to Dad’s, I was reminded why it’s important that someone be there - he was very depressed because he was thinking that he hadn’t done anything with his life and that he was going to be alone until Monday.

I gave him some soup and a muffin and coffee and told him a whole lot of things that he had done, most of them from my childhood, like making his own fake money so Franka and I could play store . He had trouble believing me and kept asking if he’d really done all that. Then he said, “a whole life, vanished.” He started thinking that he might have erased his memory on purpose. He said, “it’s like I deliberately denied all of it. I told him, “it’s wasn’t deliberate, your brain just isn’t working properly.” “You’ve created my whole life,” he told me, and then asked “how could I forget all that?”

Thinking over the childhood stories I’d told him, he said, “then, in effect, you were my child.” “I AM your child,” I replied. “Maybe now that I’ve remembered all these things, I’ll die,” he said, freaking me out. After that, he fell silent for a while and then said, “now I’m fabricating.” I thought maybe he was using the wrong word for something, and said “what do you mean?” “Making up things,” he replied, the exact definition of the term.

He decided to try to talk himself out of the gloomy mood. “I must chuck this thing. Chuck this thing and say ‘ooh, yah, I’m ready, rah, rah, rah!’” This strategy had limited success. “I wish I could say sprightly things and all that, but I can’t,” he reported.

Luckily, dinner and another serving of ice cream cake – which he called “the best dessert I’ve ever eaten”, a cigar, and listening to country music on TV seemed to cheer him up, because he started dancing with his feet and clapping his hands.

When I got ready to leave, he was in a joking mood. “Dad!” I said “I just put on my shoe without putting my sock on first!” “Carelessness! Carelessness!” he reprimanded me, in a mock-stern voice. “Oh, well, you have a long life ahead,” he concluded. “So I have plenty of time to practice putting my shoes on correctly? I asked. “Yes, practice 4 or 5 times a day,” he commanded me, smiling.

the goddamnedest weakest memory

When I arrived at Dad’s on Thursday, I found him searching for matches to light his cigar. When I steered him to them, he called me a “genius.”

“Did we have a session at 1am?” he asked me. “No, but I was here yesterday,” I told him. “We did it then?” he asked. “Did what?” I was totally confused. “Gathered together.” “Kate S. and I and you were all here yesterday,” I told him.

Dad’s really struggling with his expressive speech these days. He’s making up words sometimes, as in “I slurved a lot. I didn’t take near as many exercises as I should.” He’s very aware of it. On Thursday, he said “My speech has not gotten very good, it’s gotten bad.”

When Kate S. told him on the phone that we’re having his Father’s Day dinner on Friday, he wanted to know, “whose father?” After many explanations, he seemed to be catching on a little. “Am I related to you?” he asked me. “Yes, you’re my Dad,” I told him. “That’s what I thought,” he said.

Later, he wanted to know what was on the menu – “Stuffed peppers, black beans, salad, and ice cream cake,” I told him. “I may chuck the salad and eat a little more,” he said, meaning that he would eat extra dessert!

Watching me bake the cake, which I did ahead of time so it would be totally cooled and not melt the ice cream layers, he asked “how long have you been doing this?” “A long, long time,” I told him. “I have the god-damnedest weakest memory in existence. I can’t remember anything,” he said.

“I’ve never missed one of these dinners,” Dad said. “It would be hard to miss one, since they’re held in your apartment. You’d have to hide under the bed.” At that, Dad laughed hard.

“Voila, la chat!” says Dad, watching the cat stroll from her bed in corner to the food dish. He still uses French from time to time, especially at mealtimes, for some reason.

Dad is reaching for something on the table, groping around. “Left, left, forward, getting close,” I say, until he gets it. It’s a strange feeling, trying to remotely pilot somebody else’s hand.

I’m getting ready to leave, when Dad says, “Oh, that’s right, you don’t live here, do you?”

Classy cat

Our last night at Mohonk was fairly peaceful though Dad, who had gone to bed early, heard my computer beeping, and sat up in alarm. “Are you using the computer?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “Thank god. I thought it was going to explode,” he replied. He finally mastered the route to the bathroom, so I got a pretty decent night’s sleep.

On Saturday, we headed back. As we got closer to his house, Dad became an antsy geezer, asking over and over if he could take off his seatbelt and get out. Dad doesn’t like seatbelts – he finds them uncomfortable. I don’t think they existed when he was young. Once we got back to his apartment, Dad settled in and I put the cat, who was desperate for attention, on his lap. He gave her a cat massage – something he used to do to my mother’s cats a lot, but which I haven’t seen him do in years. Afterwards, he looked at the limp, blessed-out cat in his lap, and said, “she doesn’t want to leave now.”

By Sunday, I was totally fried from days of 24-hr Dad duty, so we asked our friend Michael to come sit with him. I felt a little guilty, but I really needed to rest and reorient myself. Michael gave Dad his dinner and listened to jazz with him.

Tonight I arrived to find Dad with two bowls on the counter – one was his salad and the other was filled with cat food, though a tomato from the salad had somehow wound up in the cat food. I was afraid that Dad would accidentally eat the cat food, so I took it from him and put it down for the cat.

Dad had cats on the brain tonight. He called his cat “classy,” and said to me, “Cats don’t get anything free, or do they?” I had to explain that people usually pay for the things cats need!

Then he was peering curiously at my computer, so I moved it close to him and guided his hands over it while explaining the various parts. Then I gave him a demonstration of various things it could do – played some music on internet radio, showed him a photo of himself (which he couldn’t really see), played the NPR news, looked up the answer to his question about when ice cream was invented. He was totally amazed, though he didn’t quite understand – he thought that a bigger computer would have access to more information. I explained to him that as technology advances, things are actually getting smaller, but I don’t know if that idea took hold.

Mohonk, part two

Dad at Mohonk (by Brianna Goldberg)

I am going to need to rest up to recover from this vacation. I got up with Dad five times from 12am-8am last night. Each time he sat up and was gazing around in confusion and I said, “hello, Dad,” he said “you’re still awake!” I wasn’t really, just sleeping with my ears open for the sound of Dad rustling, but in the morning he told Kate S. and Brianna that I’d been up all night. I’m glad he doesn’t make the connection between his needs and my staying up all night. I wouldn’t want him to feel bad about it. I noticed that another family staying here with two elderly members has clearly brought paid helpers along. Maybe I should bring Marie next time.

Kate S and I went swimming and did aquatic tai chi after breakfast, and then I was so droopy that she and Brianna took charge of him so that I could nap. They brought him to the spa where he had another massage and then Brianna got him into the hot mineral pool by telling him that it was like a tub, not enough water to be afraid of drowning (of course, you can drown in a tiny bit of water, but he doesn’t have to know that).

“You are my best friend,” he said to me, after she returned him to my custody. “Are you OK?” he asked me. “All pieces OK? I would hate to have you struggling. I would quit,” he said. A sweet sentiment, even if there’s nothing he could quit in protest.

Later, I was sitting in a wicker chair in our room, idly wiggling my foot. Dad apparently noticed the motion. “There’s a snake down there,” he said. “Dad,” I said, “it’s my foot.”

Brianna took Dad out for a cigar after dinner in the wheelchair and then I met them downstairs and he and I attended a square dance. Of course, we didn’t really dance, but he tapped his feet and said he enjoyed the music.

Dad at Mohonk (photo)

Dad in the dining room at Mohonk (photo by Brianna Goldberg)

Eels talking and trying to escape

I had a hard time sleeping last night – like a mother with a new baby, I was totally tuned in to Dad, anxiously listening to every rustle. I did have to get up a couple of times to lead him to the bathroom – by the third of fourth time, he found his own way there. Besides my own anxiety about how he was going to adjust to the new surroundings, I also had to deal with the lack of soothing cat-purring – since I usually sleep with about seven cats, being alone in bed feels strange to me.

“It’s a new world,” Dad kept proclaiming, rather loudly, at breakfast in the Mohonk dining room – a meal he called “the early-morning dinner.” He was a little groggy and confused from having been woken earlier than he’s used to in order to get to breakfast on time.

After breakfast, Brianna took Dad to the gym, to give me some time to myself. Dad enjoyed using the stationary bike, since it reminds him of the years he spent biking through Central Park to the school where he taught, in East Harlem. After the gym, Kate S. brought him to the pool, where he reclined on a lounge and listened to the new-agey music, while we swam. You can actually hear the music under the water, but even from his poolside vantage point, Dad said the music sounded like “eels talking and trying to escape.”

Leaving the pool, we were leading him down the hallway, no doubt looking like a couple of tugboats in skirts towing an elderly barge, when he suddenly started singing a John Phillip Souza march – I can’t remember its name, but its one of the patriotic ones. “It’s stuck in my head,” he informed a passing Mohonk staff member.

Back in the dining room for lunch, he suddenly announced, “when you’re in the eighties, you don’t give a damn what you might do!”

After lunch, Kate S. delivered him to the spa for a 50-minute massage – almost an hour free of his constant questions for me! When I went to collect him afterwards, he proclaimed it “marvelous! She didn’t miss a quarter of an inch.” He also said that nothing hurt or felt uncomfortable, even his cranky knees. To my surprise, he actually looked younger after the massage – he was so relaxed that his skin was smoother and it had stimulated his circulation so that his skin tone was pinker than usual.

Mohonk lent us a wheelchair so that we can get him from one end of this very long building to the other – he walked it twice, but that was enough for him. He’s actually getting way more activity here than he ever does at home and he’s been holding up pretty well.

After dinner, Brianna took him to smoke outside under a canopy in the rain. By the time she returned him, he was thoroughly worn out and fell asleep right away, still wearing his baseball cap.

blueberry gingerbread concerto

I am the first one to arrive at Dad’s, and I find him in “hysterical” mode. He knows he’s supposed to be going somewhere but the details are hazy and he’s gotten frantic trying to figure out what to do. “Where’s my money?” he demands, looking around the bedroom, even though his wallet is sitting where it has always sat, on the dining room table. I bring him his wallet and count the money for him out loud, so he feels reassured, and then herd him into the kitchen and give him a blueberry muffin and a cup of coffee, and explain, again, who’s going and where we’re going. When Dad hears that it’s just four familiar people going, he suddenly relaxes. “I’m greatly relieved,” he says, “I thought the whole thing was going to be 30 people and I wanted to get out of it.”

Dad’s trying to tell me he’s losing it, but he can’t remember the word “marbles” so he says, “I’m losing my apples . . . my pears . . . my donuts.” He’s running through his inventory of round objects, but somehow the category of food has also been entered as a search term, so he’s stuck on round foods, when marbles aren’t a food at all.

I start getting Dad ready – ancient black loafers exchanged for dressy brown ones, teeth brushed, false teeth in, pills taken and packed – and then Marie shows up. She looks down his sweater to see what he has underneath – I hadn’t thought to do that. “She’s inspecting you, Dad,” I tell him. “For guns?” he asks.

Marie goes in the kitchen and starts packing snacks for the trip, because, she says, “he eats all the time.” “What is she doing?” Dad wants to know. “Making snacks for you,” I tell him. “Why do you always want to know what I’m doing?” Marie asks him, in a teasing tone. Dad suddenly assumes a mock-innocent expression and gazes at the ceiling. “I’m looking at the ceiling,” he says, “it’s a very nice ceiling.”

When we arrive at Mohonk, I lead Dad into the room we will be sharing. I’ve had a series of role-reversal moments here – a couple years ago, it was the shock of being the “adult”, the person in charge of checking us in and handling the paperwork, when it had always been Dad’s responsibility in the past. Dad had been bringing me here since I could barely walk – when I was three, he spent hours turning me around in the waters of Lake Mohonk so that I wouldn’t see a water snake and lose my innate love of swimming. When I was a moody thirteen, and my mother’s issues were fast becoming more than either he or I could handle, he brought me here in midwinter, just the two of us, and I relished the tranquility of reading by the fireplaces. Now, for the first time, instead of sharing a room with my mother or, in later years, my partner, while he had his own room, Kate and Brianna are next door and I’m bunking with Dad. He’s too easily disoriented to be left alone in a new place.

In the room, Dad prowls around the perimeter, reminding me powerfully of the way cats behave in a new environment, though instead of identifying his surroundings by smell, he asks me what each object is each time he passes it. Finally, he identifies one of the beds as his, and relaxes.

At dinner, a formal, four-course meal, Dad does brilliantly – I order for him and he manages to clean his plate and avoid doing or saying anything unusual or knocking anything over. The only mishaps are a little bit of food that winds up on his cardigan at the end of every course, since he is without his special plates, which are actually soup plates that were used on the trains of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. The china is heavy, hard to break or tip, and the plates are a hybrid of plate and bowl, with a hefty rim. Not being able to see, Dad usually just sweeps everything on the plate against the rim on the side closest to him and scoops it up from there. Without a rim, this means that some food goes overboard. Tomorrow we’re asking for an extra napkin so we can cover him up from chin to knees.

We get to the dessert course, and tell Dad that I think he’ll like the blueberry gingerbread. Something about the sound of that phrase catches his ear, and he starts repeating it, using different tones for each syllable – a falsetto “blue” followed by a bass “berry” and then a midrange “ginger” and a high-pitched “bread.” He does this several times, varying the tones for each word, luckily quietly enough that the other diners don’t notice. When Brianna returns from the bathroom, several minutes later, he does it again, apparently for her benefit.

“You’re my favorite girl,” says Dad, as I finish removing his necktie after dinner, which sounds like a nice, fatherly sentiment – until the next sentence; “Do you want to be fucked?” He asks. “No!” I say, a little louder than I mean to. Dad seems more relieved than disappointed by this response. “I’m not sure I could do it anyway,” he says. I hide in the bathroom to give his mind a chance to wander on to something else.

“How many people will this ship hold?” he asks me, apparently thinking that we’re on a cruise. “This is not a ship, Dad, it’s a building sitting on the ground,” I tell him. “It just sits here, year after year,” he says. “For 140 years,” I tell him.

It’s past 8pm, and we’re getting into Dad’s personal witching hours. He starts having increasing trouble saying anything that makes sense. “You’ve got the boils, no biles – what’s a good word?” he says to me. I don’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about, so I can’t suggest a word. After that he gets quiet, apparently deciding that it’s easier to lie there and rest than to struggle with uncooperative words.

Cheshire cats

“Dad, why are you talking to the ceiling?” I ask Dad. “Because there’s somebody up there. I’m not sure about him,” says Dad, not taking his eyes off the ceiling. “You’re not sure about him?” I ask. “Sneaky-weaky,” says Dad.

Somehow, Dad destroyed one of the two tomato plants I forgot at his apartment the other day. One is looking great on the windowsill, but the other is only a stem, with all the leaves and branches gone. When I bring it up, Dad is immediately repentant and confesses that he did it, even though he’s not too sure what he did or why.

We’re gearing up for a trip to Mohonk, one of my favorite places on earth, someplace Dad has been going for the last 50 years. By constantly talking to him about it for weeks, we’ve gotten through to him that we’re leaving on Wednesday. “What do I need to do?” he asks. “Bring your swim trunks,” I tell him, so he feels involved although it’s really Marie who will be packing his bag. “They’re not rotten are they? I don’t remember when I put them on last,” he says. I assure him that swim trunks don’t rot.

Feeling silly tonight, Dad offers me a cigar and then giggles. “Are you in a turban or a turbine?” he asks, puzzingly. “Something you wear on your head?” I ask him. “Something you wear all over,” he says. “A bathrobe, a dress . . .” I suggest. “Like a bathing suit,” he says. “I’m in a shirt and shorts,” I tell him.

“In my early 20s, I was crazy, absolutely nuts. I think I went too far somehow and never got back in line. I’ve had a wacky life, I can tell you that,” Dad tells me.

Dad is pondering his apple juice: “it never intrudes, it’s kind of mild, it’s always there,” he says.

The hallucinations are in full force tonight. “There’s red person, a head that’s been bothering me for quite a while,” Dad says calmly. “It’s a very vicious looking thing. It recedes and comes back. Four or five different ones have done it for two or three years. It always has a very snarly – like it’s going to bite you. They change every couple of years and the other one is dead.” “Do they scare you?” I ask, thinking that seeing something like that would probably scare me. “No,” he says, “because they’re not bothering me, they can’t get me, but they’re there a good deal of the time. It’s just the head, not even shoulders, just the head, but it’s very vicious looking.”

Later, I notice Dad peering at the empty center of the dining room table – noticing him looking somewhere unusual is usually my first clue that he’s hallucinating. “These cats are exactly the same size and they’re close together and now that I’m concentrating on them they don’t show up very much. When I wasn’t paying attention to them they were much, much brighter. Now that I’ve looked away I can’t even find them. They don’t want to get eaten,” he says. “Camouflage?” I ask, since that seems to be what he’s describing, but he doesn’t recognize the word. “They didn’t want to be touched,” he says. “To this moment, I didn’t know cats could do that, but they can. Have you ever had cats that have faded away like that?” he asks. “No, but there is one is Alice in Wonderland,” I tell him. “Do you think this is Alice 2?” he asks me.

horny wart

On Tuesday, we took Dad to the doctor, just to get him looked over and make sure there’s no physical cause for his nonstop beverage consumption. In the waiting room, Dad first thought we were in a car (he and Kate S. were sitting on a loveseat type thing that probably felt like a backseat) and then he asked “Is this a Mexican restaurant?” While waiting, we discovered that Dad has lost the ability to wait – I guess if your sense of the passage of time is screwed up, it makes it hard to wait. When we finally got into the exam room, Dad was pretty unhappy about being “skinned down to my nothing,” even though they let him keep his pants, socks and shoes. The blood draw was no problem, but I had to go into the bathroom with him to facilitate the peeing-in-a-cup. Yuck.

Dad has something growing on his arm that looks absolutely horrible – it’s black on the bottom and sort of greenish white and crusty on top. I freaked out when I saw it, afraid it was skin cancer, but we showed it to the doctor and he says it’s not malignant, just a “horny wart” and that we should have the dermatologist take it off because it will get bigger.
In the taxi on the way home, Dad kept telling us about all the little kids he was seeing (invisible to us) and when we got to Dad’s building he complained that it was hard to see because of all the trees in the lobby (there aren’t any).

Michael came to sit with Dad last night while I was at the studio, and Dad told him, “You have more hair than the cat!” Michael’s hair has gotten somewhat long and he has a lot of facial hair, but how Dad knew that without being able to see is beyond me.

Tonight when I got here, Dad was just finishing his dinner. He said, several times, in French, that he had eaten too much. The doctor said that we should weigh him weekly to make sure that his weight was keeping stable since he doesn’t know how much to eat anymore. He just eats whatever he finds in front of him.

Kate S. asked Dad how he was on the phone tonight. He replied, “I’m alive and functioning with all four legs.” Indeed, he is. The doctor called to say that his tests are all fine.

Tonight, after we listened to Obama’s Cairo speech, Dad said, “I see all these little children around here. They’re just standing around. Everyone is tall now. Big, big big busses filled with people, people, people. Now all the kids are dressed in winter winter winter wear. They keep changing. I see all these little kids. They want things now.” I guess it’s a good thing that he’s not seeing anything that upsets or scares him.