My Father's Footprints Read Free Page B

please tell this to Barbara? It’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do for years, and she won’t let me.”

    My father is slipping away, so that he can only answer the most basic questions. Are you hungry? Do you want to go to bed?
    It’s 2:00 A.M. when the phone rings.
    I rush to my parents’ apartment because my father is having a bad spell.
    I get him settled in bed, get him calmed down, all very
Marvin’s Room.
He looks at my mother and says, from his delirium, “How did Colin know how to make the spooks go away?”
    “The spooks? What spooks? There are no spooks.”
    Have you ever noticed that dementia makes a person rather attractive to talk to? You can’t stop yourself. It’s kind of obsessively
     fun to argue them out of their delusions because, for once, you know you’re right. There
are
no mauve bats flying barrel rolls in the room.

    Sometimes, on lovely days, I offer the park or the woods, and he makes me take him to depressing discount stores. He wants
     to buy a watch. He has dozens. He wants some writing equipment, but the work he is determined to write—some last gasp having
     to do with Dante—never comes to anything more than a few words scribbled here and there as his mind melts into a puddle.
    “I’ll pick those up for you,” I say. “While you have me, why don’t I take you someplace pretty, so you can get some sun and
     fresh air?”
    He looks dejected.
    “That’s not fair,” he says.
    Exasperated, I load him and the wheelchair into my car and head off for Service Merchandise. He looks and looks at watches.
     He buys a certain one and takes it home. But it is the same as all the others. It shows time running out.
    Two years after his death, I tear a quadriceps tendon playing soccer and Life finally teaches me what I refused to learn back
     then. My friends are willing to fetch me anything, take me anywhere; but one day, a couple of weeks after surgery, I sneak
     out, stagger to the corner in my full-leg brace before the neighbors see me and offer to help, and I catch the bus, go to
     a coffee shop, and buy myself lunch, just for the existential thrill of asserting myself in the consumer economy. I take out
     my wallet, pay the bill, get the change. This is very fulfilling, in a way I had not expected, as if it restored substance
     to the phantasm I was becoming.
    In a capitalist age, I spend, therefore I am.
    That’s what my father craves. The ritual of the transaction.
    By the time I understand this, he is long gone, and I remember, with rue, how edgy I was on those sunny days when I thought
     I knew what he needed better than he did.

    “Is he in pain?” the aide wants to know.
    “No,” I tell her distractedly. “It’s something else.”
    We are standing in my father’s bedroom. He sleeps more and more, and from his sleep he issues peculiar sounds. Short wordless
     vocal bursts in a single tone, easily mistaken for a groan, but closer—in their sporadic pattern and duration—to the gentle
     undersea songs of whales. What do whales say? “I’m here.” “You’re there.” “You’re there.” “I’m here.” Perhaps that’s what
     my father does, from the half-sleep of life’s end: announces himself to the world, trumpets out a hopeful sound, and listens
     for what bounces back. He gives a hoot.
    When he gathers his wits, he often wants to talk—heretically—about God. In a public park, as I push him in his wheel-chair,
     he suddenly stirs, rears up, and pretty much bellows, “What I don’t understand is, if God wanted a son, why didn’t he just
     make one? Why did that poor girl have to get
knocked up?
”
    Today is the Super Bowl. I have rooted for the Green Bay Packers since I was about fourteen, which means I have endured twenty-five
     years of really awful teams until quite recently. I never had the chance to see them get near a Super Bowl until last year,
     when I was assigned a Sunday night radio show, so I missed the whole thing.
    Care for the dying