October 28, 2009: yogurt

This week has been challenging for Team Dad. On Monday, Kate S. was talking to Dad on the phone and told him she would be coming to see him the next day. Then I, desperate for conversation topics, told Dad that he would be coming to my house for Halloween, to hand out candy to the kids. He loves children, and has always enjoyed this in the past, so I thought it would make him happy.

Unfortunately, all this information about the future overloaded Dad’s fragile memory banks and sent him into a spin. He spent the entire rest of the evening interrogating me: “Tomorrow is?” he would start. “Tuesday, Dad,” I would answer. “And something is happening?” he inquired. “Big Kate is coming to visit you,” I’d tell him. “What time?” he wanted to know. “4pm.” I answered. “Do I need to dress up?” he’d ask, in a worried tone. “No, just wear pants,” I’d tell him. “Pants?” he’d ask, confused. “Trousers!” I shouted. “What’s tomorrow?” the loop begins again. “Tuesday, Dad” . . . and we did that for HOURS.

On Tuesday, when Kate S. actually arrived, Dad repeated the exercise, except this time he was asking her about Saturday. “Something’s happening on Saturday?” he’d ask and on it went, repeating until she was on the verge of tears.

Today, during the day, Dad had forgotten all but “Something’s Happening?” which he repeated to his housekeeper so often that she called me to see if I had any idea what he was talking about. I explained to her that he’s coming to my house for Halloween, but I have no idea if she tried to explain it to him because by the time I got there tonight, he had forgotten all about it and didn’t mention it at all.

I guess it’s a lesson for us Dad-keepers: don’t mention future plans because he remembers only enough to make him know there’s more he should know and it makes him anxious.

Luckily, this evening with Brianna and I, he was pretty mellow. “What are you doing now?” he asked me. “I’m looking at you,” I told him. “That’s all you’re doing?” he replied, “Jesus, that’s dangerous!”

Later he asked me, for the umpteenth time, how old he was. “86” I replied. “Is it possible that I be that old and still walk around and talk around?” he asked me. “How old can a person be and still have kittens?” he wanted to know. “Babies?” I asked. “Yes.” He replied. I broke into laughter at the idea of a person delivering a litter of kittens.

He was playing around with his voices again, too. “Kitty cat, kitty cat, kitty cat, where are you going kitty cat?” asked his normal voice. He replied, in his special cat voice, “I’m going to shit.” The cat herself slept through this performance.

Somehow we wound up talking about yogurt, and Dad was fascinated by the sound of the word. “Yogurt. Yo-gurt. Does that mean anything?” he asked me. “I don’t think so,” I responded. “’yo’, that means ‘I’ and ‘gurt’ – I don’t know,” he said, startling me – I didn’t know he remembered any Spanish.

And then there were the just plain mysterious remarks: “There’s something different about the animal catching or seeing or believing, I think. In the old days, they either fucked him or washed him away,” declared Dad, authoritatively. I have no idea what he meant.