August 13: Smut nut

8/13/09

“What are you famous for?” Dad asks, waking up from his nap. I know what my claim to fame is in his mind. “Cooking,”I tell him. “I’m the one that likes to cook.”

I have to plan the menu for tomorrow’s Friday night dinner, so I pull a book of desserts from the shelf. I hand it to Dad to examine. “What is this?” he wants to know. “A book,” I tell him. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he says, “what is it?” “A cookbook,” I tell him. “You want me to open it up and find a really good dinner?” I know all the pages look blank to him now that his eyes are so bad, so I tell him, “I’ll read you a couple of recipes and you can tell me which sounds good.”

Instead of handing the book back to me, Dad opens it, like a tablet, holding it sideways. I reach out and rotate it, and then read over his arm, “apple filo napoleons.” “Apple spiders?” he asks. I read a few more. He keeps struggling to understand. “Tart!” I yell. “Like, the queen of hearts, she ate all the tarts.” He laughs, loving the rhyme. Maybe I should read him nursery rhymes, I think. “Walnut cake!” “Wal?” he asks. “Nut!” I yell, probably piqueing the neighbors’ interest. “Smut?” Sometimes I think he’s playing with me. “Nut!!!”

Dad discovers that he can guess which of the recipes I’ve already cooked, by feeling each page. The pages of recipes I’ve used tend to be marred with streaks of melted chocolate and bits of lemon rind and the occasional drift of sugar. The corners are dog-eared, and they open wider than the recipes I’ve never used. So it becomes a game. I read the name of every single recipe and Dad feels the pages and renders his guess. He’s very accurate. He comments along the way, “all kind of goo on it!” He starts brushing stuff off, and even scratching at the page, like a cat sharpening it’s claws. “I’m improving your book, don’t doubt it,” he says.

Dad gets up, goes to the door, sticks his head into the hallway, “hello-o-o-o-o-o!” he shouts into the empty stairwell, warbling the syllables so that he sounds like a giant bird. Getting no reply, he comes back in. “Must’ve been a fake,” he reports.

Dad is pondering the lack of other people his age; “I suppose the dearth of individual exiles – people have scattered and died. That’s why I’m the only one.”