july 13: one grandiose meatball

“Today I feel like I’m falling apart,” Dad greets me at the door. “I’m doing crazy things.” “Like what?” I ask. “They rang up and I rushed around trying to find the telephone but it was right there, and I thought I had to do something to work it and it wasn’t true,” he explained.

“You know,” says Dad, “I’m kind of scared at times and one of the times is now.” “Why?” I ask. “I don’t know,” he says, “I’ve been very, very skittish the last couple of days. Skittish. Is that a word?” “Yes,” I answer. “Skittish, skittish, skittish,” he repeats.

Dad’s describing a mystery: the water he spilled has disappeared! “It evaporated,” I tell him. “Evaporated,” he says, “that’s a good word. It isn’t used very much, is it?” I start to answer, “well, only . . . “ and then get stuck for a minute, so Dad completes the sentence for me: “Only by really fancy people who have a lot of courage, a lot of stuff, then they use that word, evaporated.”

“Are you reading something?” Dad asks me, and then answers himself, “No, just commoding. That’s what I do most of my time, commode.” He sees me writing. “Are you working out the system?” he asks. I answer noncommittally.

Dad is pondering his dinner. He spears a meatball, pronouncing it a “big, grandiose meatball.” Later, he announces that his dinner is “a good chew.” Apparently he gets hooked on the sound of the words, because he goes on to rhyme, “one good chew,” with “one good horseshoe.”

Later, as we’re sitting on the couch with his cat wedged between us, he makes up a chant, like the kind of song the kids vogue to at my job, that goes: “putty cat. Putty cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Putty. Putty. Cat. Cat. Put. Cat. Put. Cat. Cat. Cat. Cat. Etc.” He ends the song by blowing several raspberries and asking me, “how’s that?” “Quite impressive,” I reply, somewhat stunned by this performance.

Dad’s feeling around the couch and comes to his own thigh. “What that?” he asks. “Your leg.” I tell him. Having discovered his leg, he proceeds to slap himself repeatedly on the thigh, saying, “naughty, naughty, naughty.”