It’s not until I’m on 95, driving
out to visit my dad, that I realize what to do with the fur hat tied by ropes
to a cinder block in the trunk of my car, a “brain anchor” used as a prop by a
friend in a surrealism creative writing class. My father not only introduced me
to the world of surrealism when I was a child, he currently inhabits one of his
own.
I’d called him the day before to
ask his permission to write about him because, I tell him, there’s nothing else
right now I can imagine writing about. Still, I feel like a vulture scavenging
for blood. “Oh, of course you can,” he says, surprising me as he always does
with his generosity. “I would be honored.” And then he suggests I write an even
longer article for a national magazine, because people love to read about other
people’s dying parents.
“But, Dad!” I say horrified.
“You’re not dying!”
“I’ve had another home invasion,”
he tells me. “It’s time to stop driving. I’m deteriorating, Valley,” he
says.
“What kind of home invasion?” I
ask, but I already know. After suffering a series of micro strokes two years
ago he began to undergo a string of MRI’s and psychiatric evaluations which have
turned up the words inconclusive,
abnormal and dementia.
Perhaps I’m biased, but I prefer my dad’s
definition of his shifting mental state to anything I’ve found online. His
first extended hallucination he described as a “cosmic, horrific supernatural
freak show of southern holiness.” A tall man with lobster claws for hands and
his very short 300 pound wife, who, together looked like a period and an
exclamation point, were the leaders of the pack. “They were hungry and fat and
wanted peanut butter sandwiches,” he told me. “I thought I was going to be
killed, maybe eaten.” Between trying to beat them away with pillows and making
them peanut butter sandwiches, my father called my stepmother and begged her to
call the sheriff. She’d assured him it wasn’t real and asked him to hang on
until she got home. “I know they’re hallucinations,” he tells me. “But the real
question is, are they still there when I’m gone?”
When I sob to a friend on the phone, the
gravity of the situation finally hitting home, she says, “It’s like watching a
redwood fall in the forest.” And she’s right. My dad has always been fit and
tall and handsome but I think it’s the largesse of his imagination she’s
referring to. Growing up, he always kept an open house, an open mind and a tendency
to regard the lines between reality, dreams, poetry, fiction and fact more like
suggestions than absolutes. As a child, he opened up for me the world of story.
Now, at 63, his mind is writing a whole new chapter.
The characters that populate his
imagination visit his waking life as well. Civil War soldiers ride up to him on
horse back; furry white animals streak the yard; pterodactyls soar through the
house. But it’s the confusion, the memory loss and the fat illiterate family of
rednecks, the home invaders, with whom he’s had to make his peace. “I’m much
more welcoming to them now,” he tells me. “Which makes them go away faster. The
lesson here is that no evil can stand up to humor!”
When I pull into my dad’s driveway
he’s bright eyed, holding a riotous fistful of purple irises from his garden. I
drive him around to do the things he can no longer do by himself and when we’re
done, because I don’t know what else, other than my time, I can give him, I
pull the brain anchor out of my trunk. “It’s perfect!” he says and shows me a
sculpture in the front yard made of bits of metal and discarded scraps of wood.
“I call it stacking,” he says. And he explains to me his new art form, one that
takes on different shapes and unexpected dimensions, becoming more bizarre and
more beautiful each day.
