The Wind in His Hair

In some ways, my family was two families. There were twelve years and ten years separating me from my two older sisters. My parents were in their young thirties when Brenda and Noreen were born. My Dad turned forty-five a few weeks after I came along. My sisters left one after the other for college when I was still in grade school. They never lived with my parents as fifty-year olds. They did not live with Dad as an old man or with Mom as an aged woman. I never knew them as young.

Trailing my two sisters by so many years was not without advantages. They had been forced to compete for my parents’ time and attention. That meant vying for my mother’s time and attention since Dad, when he was young, toiled many hours in the insurance office he inherited from his father. The business was never large and we were never wealthy but by the time I was born, it was reasonably stable. Dad had nurtured a strong reputation in the community. He donated to the right causes – scholarship funds, the volunteer fire department and school theater productions – and he cultivated an easy, trusting manner. As time passed, he was able to hire a couple of agents and later an office manager. He was also able to enjoy something almost unheard of when my sisters were young: Saturdays at home.

My recollections of Dad during this period are a statement in contrasts. One stream of memories takes place around an old pine table in a breakfast nook where our Saturdays began. I am there at the table, sitting on a white bench backed by a sunny yellow kitchen wall. My mother is across the table from me sipping her coffee; enjoying, even more than the coffee, what she called the “luxury of lingering.”

Although other childhood details elude me, the image of Dad on those mornings is clear. He is relaxing, sort of. He is doting on my mother and me; brewing coffee, making pancakes, waffles, fruit salad. He would often bake bread or muffins to fill the kitchen with a warm, embracing scent that in his mind, and years later when I became a parent in my mind too, signaled “home.”

While I ate and while Dad poured coffee and monitored whatever might be in the oven, some mysterious and exciting expedition would unfold. He could conjure an adventure out of even the most routine of errands. A trip to the post office or dry cleaner, for example, could never be undertaken without a side journey “playground reconnaissance.” This was an investigative analysis of the facilities at various elementary school and town play areas. While I swung or slid or climbed, I would hear him cataloging detailed scientific-sounding comparisons of this and the other neighborhood parks. I always assumed that he transcribed these observations in some important journal, envisioning a thick hard-covered log, filled with notes about where to find extra wide slides, covered chutes or age-rated climbing walls. Years later when I realized that there was no such written record I felt discernible disappointment. Even now, when I am alone at his house going through his things, I sometimes imagine the joy of stumbling upon this priceless treatise.

While that official field guide remains unwritten, Dad’s verbal record of our little village remains etched permanently into my brain. He imbued even small and familiar things with legend and myth. Across the street from our house was a path that followed a small stream as it wound through the woods and subsequently emerged near a pond. Neighbors used this path to walk their dogs, get to the park or just to stroll but Dad enriched it with mystery.

Here, according to Dad, was Raccoon Ridge, where furry masked bandits sorted their mischievously gotten booty by the moonlight. Where a tree had fallen across the stream was Coyote Bridge, used by coyotes to escape the woods and roam the town on winter nights. In the distance where others could see only rotting logs Dad saw the false teeth of a wayward giant named Flaherty who, he promised, would one day return for them and round up those marauding coyotes and pillaging raccoons.

Further along the path was a spot that he had christened Dead Man’s Drop. There was in fact a precipitous descent here as the rising path gave way to steep a decline down to the stream below. I walked it countless times over the years but what I mainly remember is bouncing on Dad’s shoulders as he carried me on along. The added height, the brisk rhythm of his gate, the precariousness of being borne aloft combined to assure me that the name was well earned and that any number of poor tragic souls had met their untimely ends just over that ledge. It is a happy memory, not a frightening one. Tousles of his hair dancing to the measure of his stride; the firm clasp of hands on my ankles anchoring me to his shoulders. The nearness of danger made the contrasting feelings of safety and security especially prized commodities. To be sure I was never too frightened, Dad created a secret signal for us: three taps on his shoulder meant I was okay, no need to slow down.

The embellishments and legends were for my benefit, but I think they also helped make the outings less routine for him. With more leisure time now, Dad began indulging himself with long bike rides. I was fortunate enough, and portable enough, to be his companion. My memories of sitting behind him, buckled into my safety seat are at once vivid and vague. The breeze whistles through the openings in my helmet; I can hear the hum of the tires against the pavement; I watch wayward strands of his graying locks surfing in the wind. All these years later I can still almost feel the breeze on my skin yet the memories end there, on the back of the bike. I can guess where we were going because I know where the trail starts and finishes but I have no recollection of what we did in between. The background details have escaped me.

Maybe it is fitting to hold dear the motion-memories and to surrender those that involve mundane tasks. Routine things become invisible to me; they always have. I cannot decide whether this trait comes from Mom or Dad but as I pull into the parking lot it occurs to me that I’ve done it again, gotten here with no mental awareness of how. Sometimes being somewhere is more important than getting there. Not that I am happy to be here. I take an extra sip of coffee and breathe in the scent of the fresh-baked bread I am bringing him today. The car is warm, safe, it smells of home. It would be nice to stay here and enjoy the luxury of lingering.

I am relieved by not seeing my sisters’ cars in the parking lot. If anyone else is coming today, I have gotten here first. Mom still drives and I pretend to look for her car, even though she only comes if one of my sisters brings her. She doesn’t come with me because I am still disappointed that she acquiesced so quickly to this assisted-living arrangement. To be fair, she lived with Dad’s slow decline longer than we girls; she was probably exhausted and scared. Her perspective is different from mine and I understand that. Sort of. This is one of the things I am working on with my therapist. She calls it developing empathy for the vast menagerie of individualized mechanisms people use for dealing with sadness. I call it not strangling my family.

A distant movement catches my eye and I see a young boy, maybe ten or twelve, reluctantly trailing his parents. He looks far from happy. Creating a scenario and projecting emotions on him, I surmise that he is visiting a grandparent inside. It’s a beautiful Saturday morning; and he doesn’t want to be here. His friends are at home sleeping, or up and out, playing soccer. I imagine him thinking how he would be there too, if some grandparent was not so old.

In my defense, I am aware of what I am doing even as I am doing it, right down to the choice of the sport. I was a bit disingenuous when I said that Dad never seemed old to me. There was a time when, to my adolescent brain, he seemed to be an old person trying too hard to appear young. Why else, a certain ten year old wondered, would a fifty five year old man volunteer to coach a girls’ soccer team? It was not just that he was the coach; it was the way he coached. My teammates and I were the kids the travel clubs never considered, meaning we were not very good. We knew it and so did our parents. We were there because we were friends or because our parents were friends or, maybe just for the “everyone is a winner” post-practice ice cream.

The coaches in this league typically came in two varieties: the ones who had played soccer and knew enough to impart some practical game strategy and skills training and the dads who were challenged just to keep the right number of players on the field. Dad was a third type. He raced up and down the sidelines as the play shifted from offense to defense, probably running as much or more or than most of the players. There was a certain grace to his running. His long lean frame was suited for it but, as his daughter, I found his energy and enthusiasm mortifying. Suggesting that he was too old proved fruitless. “You don’t stop running because you get old,” he would say slowly, as if I should be writing his this down, “You get old because you stop running.”

Running along the field was not the only problem. When he called upon my childhood themes to inspire the team – telling the girls to “kick like Flaherty” or “run like the coyotes are out” – I wanted to give up soccer altogether. I told Mom I was embarrassed but she probably knew that really, I was hurt that he so willingly shared my personal mythology with everyone else. To make matters worse, my teammates and their parents loved all of this. They even encouraged it. I was probably the only kid who prayed for rainy Saturdays.

My friends and I eventually stopped playing, of course. We moved on to different sports, different clubs, and, sometimes, different friends. Dad stopped coaching and Mom stopped watching. I never gave much thought to what my parents did on weekends after soccer ended. It was only when my youngest outgrew his Saturday morning league that I realized my parents probably missed my games more than I had. Those days come to mind frequently now, especially on mornings like this when I sit here trying to muster the courage to go inside.

Part of me believes that I contributed to all of this, his being here in the center. I know this is ridiculous because my therapist tells me it is but I keep coming back to it. It makes perfect sense: I quit playing soccer and Dad stopped coaching. He stopped running on the sidelines. You get old because you stop running. On Thursdays at seven, while my husband feeds the boys, my therapist reminds me that Dad did not get old overnight and on Thursdays at seven I understand. But alone in the car on Saturday mornings I have my doubts. It had to start sometime. Maybe it started the week I quit playing. Maybe it started one day when I got my wish for a rainout.

My therapist tries to steer me away from this thought process, telling me that aging is a natural, beautiful, spiritual process because when things are horrible, tragic and frightening it’s better to call them natural, beautiful and spiritual. When I point this out, she lets the slightest hint of exasperation slip through her stoic veneer, steals a glance at the clock and tells me, “Amy, every generation is surprised by its own demise.” What she means but what she will not say is, “It will happen to you. Amy, you’re going to die too.” But getting old, getting dementia, dying cannot possibly be as bad as watching someone else do it, someone you love.

“That’s okay,” I tell her, “I hear it’s a very beautiful and spiritual thing.”

Afterward I go home and clean up whatever mess Warren and the boys have left for me. It feels good to be useful for something and sponge-therapy is very helpful. At least until the kitchen is clean.

On my way to the building, I catch myself balancing along the curb instead of using the sidewalk. I think of “Dead Man’s Drop” and the first time I brought my grad-school boyfriend home for the weekend. We took a walk to the park that afternoon but everything I showed him seemed so small. I had secretly let myself imagine coyotes slithering one after the other across the bridge that bore their name but, with Jim next to me, all I saw was a skinny tree limb so brittle it could barely support a cat.

“More like ‘Sprained Ankle Drop,’” Jim teased when we stood at the precipice of that particular landmark. He grinned impishly, daringly. I could see the risk was small, but I shook my head anyway as he jumped. He was fine of course and suddenly the drop did not seem dangerous at all. I smiled but he could tell that I was upset about something and he almost guessed what it was.

“It’s natural, you’re bigger,” he reassured me as he gestured to the woods. “You grew; they didn’t.” He was right, but there was something else. I had been in and out of these woods over the years; played tag here in middle school, walked my sisters’ children to the park on weekends, kissed boys here in high school. Nothing felt smaller then.

“They shrank,” I said to Jim. I think he knew that I meant my parents. They were shrinking, physically a little, but they also seemed smaller, frailer, on a level that I could not fully digest. I was on the verge of graduating; I was about to open the door to a vast array of opportunities. Their focus was narrowing to the farmers market and garage sales. They were circling the wagons against aging, against life. They were happy, I suppose, but I could not understand why. Jim’s observation was right. I grew; they didn’t.

The receptionist greets the revolving door with a smile but it is a conditioned response. When she sees me entering the smile fades to a mere nod of recognition. She knows my face and maybe knows my name from the sign-in sheets but she probably thinks of me as “the quiet one.” Compared to my sisters and my Mom, this is hardly unfair. Her eyes point toward the atrium, by which I understand that’s where Dad is. I sign in and head down the hallway. I realize I’ve left the bread in the car, but decide I’ll take Dad with me to get it rather than retrace my steps and pass the front desk again.

Thinking of Jim this morning is odd. We stayed together after graduation, envisioning our life together. I loved all the planning but he had this funny quirk; once he planned something he actually wanted to do it. I thought I did too but things, my parents mainly, had changed while I was away, and I could not disconnect those changes from my being away. I knew on a rational level that it was foolish to blame myself or compromise my goals because my parents had aged but I did not know that in my heart. Even now, when it is clear that my proximity proved no elixir for their health, those irrational concerns would have me staying close to home and saying good-bye to Jim all over again. My therapist says there is a name for that kind of fear; at two hundred dollars an hour I should be able to remember but can’t.

Jim has not crossed my mind for years but now I suddenly find myself talking to him, telling him about visiting Dad. The pretend monologue only stops when I enter the sunroom and search for my father. Due to the layout of the building, this room actually only gets direct sunlight late in the afternoon but no one comes here then because twilight and dusk are burdensome times for the aged. I prefer to take Dad outside anyway so he can feel the world instead of watching it from the sterile side of plate-glass windows. The patients, or “guests,” as the staff refer to them, have their backs to the door but Dad stands out. His mind plays hide-and-seek with him, but his body has been loyal. He sits more upright than the others, a legacy of all his running and biking. His wheelchair has a blanket draped over the handles. I suppose that whoever brought him from his room knows that I usually come on Saturdays and take him outside.

Dad looks less familiar up close. His hair is matted, “dementia hair,” I tell Jim, renewing the monologue to avoid feeling so alone. But it is Dad and I pat him on the shoulder and lean forward into the space between him and the “guest” on his left. I keep my face distant enough that he can see me, make out my features and maybe, maybe today, recognize me. He smiles and nods, but the gesture implies acquiescence, not recognition. He is acknowledging that something will happen now and I, whoever I am, may continue.

I bite on my lip and unfurl the blanket over him, then ease the chair back slowly, careful not to disturb the people on either side of him. I feel comforted that from this angle he cannot see the tears that have welled up in my eyes. We pivot to move forward and under the blanket, his hands move from his lap to the arm rests as if preparing for motion. The image holds my gaze.

When we reach the lobby I see that someone else has just used the handicap doors and I think to myself that if I hurry we can make it to the door before it closes. And so, I hurry. We hustle through the closing doors but something happens and I do not slow down, I go faster. I run. I run and, even though it is matted, I see the rise and fall of the wind in his hair. I feel the breeze on my face. “The coyotes!” I want to yell, “Flaherty! Flaherty is coming,” I want to tease but the words won’t come except with sobs so instead I lean forward, tapping his shoulder three times as I run, as we move.