Sept. 26: a very, very good foot

Dad’s hat – a maroon baseball cap today – tumbles to the floor while we’re sitting on the couch. Having gotten into the habit as a child (encouraged by my ballet teacher), I reach down, pick it up, and hand it to him using my foot. Dad proceeds to shake hands with my foot, and then pats it like a dog, saying “you’re a very, very good foot.”

Knowing that Saturdays, when I’m with Dad from noon-ish until 9pm, can get very long, I’ve come prepared. I pull sheets of bubble wrap from my bag and hand them to him. I love watching him pop them because he goes “oh!” after each one, as though he’s being surprised, over and over again. By the second sheet he has commanded me to join in, and he politely waits between each pop, so we’re taking turns.

Dad’s dessert addiction is taking a toll – for the first time in his life, he can’t get his jeans buttoned. He is completely perplexed. “I think someone boiled my jeans!” he announces, despite the fact that denim doesn’t shrink like wool. It takes a while for it to dawn on him that maybe he’s gotten bigger. “There’s lots of useless stuff in my guts that would be better gone,” he says, poking at flabby flesh. “If you take your clothes off, you see it’s bad because there’s at least ten extra pounds doing nothing,” he tells me.

Dad needs to exercise anyway, to maintain his mobility, so we go out the door – me in sweatpants and bare feet and him in jeans and orange crocs – and carefully navigate down one flight of stairs. Each time his foot lands on the step below, Dad yells “boom!” Thankfully, nobody in his building seems to be home. Then we go back up. Dad is winded, so I tell him that’s enough stairs – we’ll work our way up to the full three flights. When we get back in, I give Dad his 1 lb. weights and he does various exercises with his arms. When he’s done, he says he feels “loosened up.”

“What time is it?” Dad asks, a question he sometimes asks as often as every ten minutes. “5:49pm,” I answer. “Then we should begin singing,” he says, and launches into “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” I join in and we are loud and off-key, but Dad is happy. I have been trying to get Dad to sing “This Land is Your Land,” a song I know he knows – my grade school chorus sang it so much that every parent in that school probably heard it in their dreams – but he just bops along and won’t sing. I’ve also tried singing “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a tribute to his recently-deceased old friend, Mary Travers, who he remembers as a gorgeous blond twenty-something playing softball with him in Washington Square Park, but he doesn’t respond to the song.

“I have a whole field,” says Dad, running his hands over a month’s worth of beard and whiskers. It’s been a long time since he could shave himself. Marie has done it for years, but less and less frequently recently, and Dad says she doesn’t want to do it – I have no idea why. This produces a dilemma for me – I certainly don’t want to pressure Marie, but there’s no barber in the neighborhood, just a women’s beauty salon around the corner. The growth is clearly bothering Dad – he keeps commenting on it – so I’m beginning to think about attempting it myself. I’m definitely at a disadvantage here, never even having watched a man shave, but I’ve discovered that sometimes you just have to jump into the breach.