My father scared the hell out of me the other day. He appeared like a little elderly ninja. Poof.
Most times I hear him before I see him. I hear a familiar hesitant shuffling. I hear him moving in fits and starts. The cautious sound of unsure and timid feet. Checking every nook and cranny of the house. Like a small child looking semi-anxiously in the towering and numerous aisles of a large store to find his unexpectedly misplaced mother or father. He doesn't like it when people call out to him. He thinks everyone is just looking for an excuse to yell at him. It's best to just sit and let him find you. My mother says sometimes it's like watching a person re-live a day.
When he finds me he moves like he's on a mission. He stands right beside me in the chair. He just stares down at me for a second. "Shoes," he says. Pointing down at his feet. White laces dangling besides both of the navy blue sneakers we both stare down at. "Tie my shoes." He says like he's going to be five in a few more months. Like he is going out to play, the other kids are all waiting, but for these infernal knots that elude and torment him. Then he steps back. One step. Two. Staring at you, staring back down at his feet, staring back up at you.
Not this time. This time he nearly gave me a heart attack as he suddenly said "Shoes."
His solemn and unsettlingly pale blue eyes are more watery now. Sad. The years of exposure to sun, wind, and the elements from the icy dark seas of his childhood Norway to the wicked cold gales of my youth on the South Shore of Massachusetts have all left their marks. His lids are heavy, almost hooded, peering out at the world like he's waiting for something elusive. He always seems like he is looking at something a thousand miles away. But not now. Now he wants me to please hurry up and get down on my knees and tie his shoes. Which I do.
The iron hands. The ones hardened from years and years of hauling and tying ropes as a Merchant Marine and from swinging a carpenter's hammer when he became an American have passed into myth and legend. The hands I see now dangling just about at my eye level as I get to work making the loops and tucking the laces up and under. They are strangers to me now. Almost like the film prop versions of those terrifyingly strong hands that I always will remember from decades past. "Good," he says as I finish the left one. "Now do the other one."
Ten anxious fingers begin to wave side-to-side to stop me cold in mid-movement.
"Not too tight," he says. Warily. Like I sounded at five, fearful of onions snuck in the sauce.
He is eighty five now. Eighty five. He can tell you about the SS officers he saw in the early 1940's, or about his memories of going to shore in Rio in the 1950's, or about living in Brooklyn in the early 1960's at the drop of a dime. But sometimes its a coin-flip if he will remember something that happened in the last twenty years. He is a full three inches shorter than his official height measurement on his treasured US Citizenship forms from 1964. He insists that his shoe trouble is entirely due to the aches and pains of bending over or kneeling down.
But I have seen him. When he thinks he is alone and nobody is watching. I have watched him with my own eyes. Staring intensely at a single upheld shoe. Slowly, meticulously, like he's disarming an unstable bomb, as he fiddles around with the two laces. Intent to get it right. This time. This time for sure. Only to toss it down on the floor after a barrage of attempts. Exhaling in exasperation and impotent anger. Pride dissolved to shame cruelly cutting him like invisible thorns. Wondering if maybe forgetting these bits is a tiny odd mercy. Only he doesn't.
That? That he remembers. Like humiliation and shame is recorded on sterner stuff.
My mother pulled me aside one day I was visiting to say that he is only allowed to use the stove to boil water. In the tea kettle. But casually, keeping back so he doesn't feel like people are smothering him, make a note to check on him even then. His older sister died in rural Norway last Summer. At Christmas time she wandered out at night in her night clothes, alone into a swirling snow, apparently to see that her cousin had properly shuttered her home. This cousin who had died thirty years ago. Her granddaughter found her half-frozen at sunlight.
By mid-July they got the call that she passed away due to complications from that night. 89.
After that, my father going off alone for walks without telling anyone he was going out in the southern Nevada desert heat became an even bigger hypothetical nightmare for my mother.
My father gets on the telephone with his still-living brothers and sisters in Norway. He speaks Norwegian for hours on the phone. Then, when he hangs up, he sometimes forgets to switch back to English. Or he doesn't realize he's not speaking English. A nightmare for a man whose memory is fading. Being greeted with baffled and bewildered stares as he repeats himself, loudly, in Norwegian to people who don't understand the strange sounds coming out of his mouth. Like an ugly American tourist having a "DO YOU SPEAK ANY ENGLISH" moment abroad.
"Bind min sko." He might randomly say matter-of-factly.
"What?" I might hesitantly reply in bumfuzzled surprise.
"BIND. MIN. SKO." He retorts, holding out his arms in exasperation with a 'duh' look on his face. "Min SKETCHY. Min Sko. Min Sko. Min TENNY Sko." I'm just staring at this point. I'm staring at him like he just told me that he had no internal organs, because maybe he did.
(My dad has been American too long, and yet not long enough. As this is the point where the rude American tourist in Paris or Tokyo begins angrily spelling out the English words slowly at the top of his lungs to the baffled foreign soul who doesn't understand him at any volume or speed. I'm literally staring at him and waiting for S!... K!... O!...)
People who are aware that they are slowly or rapidly losing their memories sometimes have anger, or even rage, issues. They often feel picked on. Persecuted. Set up to be yelled at. They wonder if people are moving things around they can't find for their own sick amusement. There can be suspicion issues and mistrust that is hard to unwind or unpack once you get in the habit of responding negatively or with anger. When I get pissed off at my dad, I don't vent it on him, back at him, but away from him. I choose not to make things worse whenever I can.
My grandfather, deeply scarred by the rise and rule of Quisling and the Nazis that came with, was loathe to have any of his sons wear the military uniform of a nation that so easily went fascist in his eyes. Even just debating mandatory military service after the war enraged him. One day he dragged my dad and his brother down to a busy dock in Molde, he was seventeen and his brother was nineteen, he put one on a Danish ship, one on a Swedish ship, and sent them away. My father to America, my uncle to Australia. Neither ever saw his parents again. So. I don't speak Norwegian. The language of being sent into exile "for your own good" in 1947.
"Dad. You're speaking in Norwegian." (And it's like Archie Bunker Borat. Which I might share with Mom, but with you? That I won't share, as you hate both.)
"Oh. Oh. Oh. The English. Shoes. Tie my tennis shoes. The sketchy sneakers. The Sketchers."
Okay. So. For future reference... Bind min sko. "Bind/Tie My Shoes."
Anyone who has ever served as a caretaker will tell you that if you didn't laugh at some of the absurd things that arise from dealing with a loved one in crisis or decline, you'd go insane.
Tying my father's shoes is a sobering ritual. This man who is fading and fraying like his old denim work clothes did in my memories of him from when I was young. He has developed a fascination with watching previously loathed television game shows as he navigates through his later years. "They never change," my mother says, "they stay the same. Wheel of Fortune in 1985? Or 2005? Or 2015? Three contestants. A Wheel. A Word or Sentence. A smarmy host. A smiling letter-turner. Spin. Bankrupt. Buy a vowel. Bonus round. Prizes." The Elysium Fields of knowing.
The once derided becomes the friendly familiar. Even with many changes its still all the same.
"I'm finished. You're good to go." He is suddenly far less child-like. He rises up a wee bit taller.
"Good," he says. He picks up one foot, then the other, and jangles them until he can see the laces are tied. Then he confidently thanks me by my brother's name as he shuffle-strides away. A second later he freezes. He turns around. "I mean, thank you..." and then he sheepishly says my actual name before nodding once. Then turning around and returning to muscling his way towards the copper-clad cane he keeps leaning besides the front door. I can tell that he's profoundly proud that he caught himself. As I said. The Elysium Fields of knowing.