Surfaces
My father has become fascinated with the surfaces of things. He’s amazed at the beauty of the world around him, at a child who smiles at him. When we drive past a small dog, he’ll cry out, “Look at the baby!”
Far and away, his favorite topic is words. “I’m telling you, it’s just amazing,” he says. “’Goodbye?’ Where did that come from? What does it mean?”
He gestures toward my cell phone, so I look it up. “It comes from ‘godbwye,’ a contraction for ‘God be with you.’”
“See? And nobody knows—people are going to love this,” he says. “It’s just wonderful.”
Lately, it feels like the rest of us are swimming in language and he’s floating on top.
He’s ninety and has dementia. He struggles to understand basic reasoning, or to follow complex sentences and lately, it feels like the rest of us are swimming in language and he’s floating on top. Undistracted by the undercurrents of meaning or logic, he sees words in all their naked magnificence.
Lists of words have appeared in small piles on the dining room table, the kitchen counter, his office desk, and throughout the house where he lives alone, where paid caregivers keep an eye on him from morning until late evening, where my sister, my brother, my husband and I are visiting more and more often.
I find two lists that have slipped underneath a sofa. More are littered across his bed, next to the heaps of books he’s come to sleep with in the years since my mother died, since his second marriage failed, since he’s had any sleeping companion. (If I have dementia someday, I’ll be sleeping with books too, if my husband lets me.)
I agree with my dad’s point that the oft-forgotten stories of our cultures are embedded in our everyday language, so the ways we once took leave of each other still linger in plain sight (“Farewell!” my dad says. “So long!”). He doesn’t distinguish among the themes in his word lists, although I do. The lists of everyday words with potentially intriguing etymologies metamorphose into lists of places, lists of rhyming words, lists of opposites. (“Come! Go!” he says. “Did you write that one down?”) Two pages of the secret notebook his caregivers keep for us are filled with the names of countries, states, cities—these in a new, disjointed handwriting and freakish spelling. I open his calendar and this week’s pages are already covered with lists of rhyming words.
“Able,” he says one morning.
“Stable,” I respond. “Fable, label.”
“Mabel!” he says, gleefully.
“Table.” This from my brother, who is actually at the other end of the table.
Then, “Able,” from my dad, and we begin again.
After a while, I call time-out for business: I summarize an email, and my dad asks a couple of questions. Then his eyes dart to the side. “Table!” he says. “Able. Mabel.” My brother and I give up.
My dad’s fascination with language, by itself, is not surprising. He’s a former small-newspaper publisher, and he loves books, continues to buy books at the local independent bookstore, though I don’t think he’s capable any more of the sustained focus required for reading more than a page. If that. When I tuck him in one night, he picks up one of the books on his bed. “I like to study a book first to see if it’s worth reading,” he says. “I count the photographs or pictures.” He leafs through the hardback he’s holding. “This one doesn’t have any.”
“I look at the acknowledgments and the introduction and the…what’s it called?”
“Epilogue? Index?”
To my horror, I realize he’s busy writing on the book’s title page: “No art.”
“And I look at the number of pages,” he says, thumbing to the end and writing down this information too. “Four hundred pages??” Now, he’s giggling. “I’ll never read that.” He sets the book down on the sheets next to him. “What else have you got?”
Four hundred pages was not daunting to him a couple of years ago. He once enjoyed biographical tomes, histories, fictional books about sailing adventures, anything about trains, all kinds of political analyses and, especially, books about U.S. presidents. Now, I hand him a book about trains, which he says he’s already read; a regional history book; a picture book about dogs. None of these hold his interest, but I say good-night and leave him with the trains book.
The next morning, when we walk his dog, Maggie, my dad shakes his head in wonderment. “What do you suppose dogs think about?” he asks. I try not to answer, and he asks again, “What do you think she’s thinking?”
Yesterday, my answer: “Maggie’s thinking about other dogs. She’s investigating the smells they left behind this morning.” I like to remind him of her name.
The week before, I say, “She’s thinking about the turkeys,” because the wild turkeys that haunt his neighborhood are another of his obsessions.
“She’s thinking about autumn, because she can smell it in the rotting grass and the roots of trees,” I say. “And she can feel the snow coming.” Because my dad takes such joy in her winter exuberance.
But he doesn’t care what I say. His mind only has room for the question. The same is true for the word etymologies. (“’Thank you’—where does that come from?” my dad says, but when my husband looks it up and tries to tell him, my dad has already moved on to the next word: “Obligatory!”).
On our walk, as we turn around and head towards his house, we see his neighbor at the fence. “Alabama!” my dad says to him and cracks up.
The neighbor, Jim, doesn’t miss a beat: “Banana, nana-nana, go-nana,” he says, entering into the game.
Godbwye, Jim, God be with you, I think. For letting go of pure reason in the moment. For your playfulness.
For skating on the surfaces of language with us.