It was a Saturday. I visited my father in the care home where he’s living his letztes Kapitel. I took him for a walk in a nearby park. I would repeat this the next day, Sunday. I visit my Dad every Saturday and every Sunday.
What I’m about to write could have happened on any of those visits. The exactness of facts, including time, is completely irrelevant to anything going on in relation to my father these days.
He is suddenly showing unmistakable signs of dementia.
I’m talking here about a period of mere weeks separating the “before” and the “after.”
Well, he’s 96 years old. Why would dementia not catch up with this stubborn man eventually, even if it might have done so less abruptly?
Save that the more logical connection is not with age, but with the various forward falls from his wheelchair, smack on his head, before he was assigned the reclining wheelchair three weeks ago.
In the park, we took a couple of different turns than usual.
On Saturdays, people in this country—rather than visit their old folks and take them for a stroll—tend to amass in the narrow streets of city centres to spend as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, on stuff they will later look at dejectedly and helplessly, once it’s inside their homes.
Sundays, especially the empty time between late afternoon—when the second round of weekend shopping is done—and early evening—when the sports broadcasts start—are for things they hate but feel obligated to do: such as paying attention to people who have been craving it at every other hour of the week.
Except, of course, when it’s a hot Sunday in summer.
Then they gather on the beaches like walrus, or clog the roads stuffed into their cars all day long in desperate attempts to get near to one, aggression growing to a point where they would kill a person merely for pitying them.
Their parents can wait another week.
But this was a Saturday.
People were busy elsewhere, and the park was quiet despite the brilliant weather—warm, not hot, the sun prettily veiled, off and on, by the haziest of clouds.
My Dad was enjoying himself tremendously, repeating every other minute how agreeable the weather was, and actively looking left and right (as much as the stiffness in his neck allowed) to take in all of nature’s unobtrusive wonders.
He even commented on the ice-age boulders bordering the entrance to a restaurant that we ignored, having no business going there.
I felt happy and proud to procure such bliss in my father.
We arrived at a patch of green where a group of young women—and a lone young man—were practicing rolls and breakfall techniques under the supervision of a trainer. They were students, I gauged, dressed in white karate or judo uniforms.
They were at quite a distance.
Still, I thought I recognized my son in the young man.
The impressive head of curly hair—and the unathletic awkwardness of his movements—reminded me vividly of him.
(He gets that hair from his mother. If I wash, towel-dry, and brush my hair in the afternoon—something I do once every two weeks—I find it still damp on the back of my head the next morning.)
I stopped pushing the wheelchair and peered at the group as if riveted by some extraordinary public performance.
It was impossible to make out the young man’s face.
I turned the wheelchair, pointing in the group’s direction.
My father declined to look.
“You hear the tits?”, he said. It took me a few moments to realize he meant a species of birds.
Then he said, still not looking, calling me by the pet name he had used for my mother, who passed away two years ago:
“No, Doll, that is not our son.”
Hard Nosed Women 