Father’s Day
I wheeled him into the dining room, and he sat at the table staring straight ahead, slowly, slowly moving a shaky hand up to his mouth, slowly, slowly, chewing his food, which I had cut up in tiny pieces. My father, the irascible father of my childhood, would never have stood for anyone eating like that. I could almost hear that father sighing, clucking, muttering under his breath. Come on, already. Let’s go. Jeezus H. Christ.
My father, the nasty one, was an eater. Portions could not be too big for him. He judged the worth of restaurants based on how much of his dinner plate was obscured. The ideal plate, invisible under mounds of food, would be 75 percent meat, 25 percent potato, 0 percent vegetable and 1000 percent sodium. But that spring, sitting in the wheelchair, staring ahead, struggling to eat, he finished perhaps half of one small portion, maybe an ounce or two of chicken, not much more than a bite my father of old would have taken. Then grunted and waved his hand in the air, dismissing the meal.
During the long days of my last visit, not knowing what to do but knowing I should be doing something, I gave my father foot massages while I told him stories about the Saturdays we spent together: sledding breakneck down the hill at Bethpage State Park, the time the horse almost rolled over on me, the time he bowled 225, the time we almost fell through the ice at the pond, sundaes at Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlour that we didn’t tell my mother about. He stared up at the ceiling while I talked. He dozed. He didn’t seem to be listening. It probably too late to tell him all this.