CONTENTS      LAST VINEGAR STROKE     DOORKNOBS     ROCK MAGIC     FROM THE CHANCERY ARCHIVES OF KING HENRY V     A POCKETKNIFE AND A CIVIL UNION     EVEN YOU CAN BE A WINNER!     AUTHORS

       "If you don't come home but once every twelve years you're gonna miss out on an item or two." I glanced at the kitchen clock; then my watch.
       "I don't see why we can't just take him out to lunch."
       "You'll see tomorrow."
       "What's wrong with him?"
       "He's ninety-two."
       "But he's in good health, right?"
       "He had trouble breathing a couple of years ago and thought he was having a heart attack—"
       "Yeah. The last time you called me."
       "—and I couldn't get him admitted to the hospital, so he must be in good health."
       "So we'll take him somewhere. Do something."
       I waved away the suggestion. "The day before I called nine-one-one I stopped by and the house smelled great. I said, You cleaning, Pops? He said, No, I'm killing ants. But he was spraying them with Lemon Pledge."
       "That's kinda cute, even."
       "The ants were coffee grounds. He's just failing, Will. There's nothing wrong with him except entropy."
       He poured some pinot and settled the bottle on the table amid the remains of rigatoni and Caesar salad. He said to me, "When'd you quit drinking?"
       "I didn't." I should call Margie and tell her that. Ironical, me lying about not drinking. Actually I'd quit about three, four years ago—I wasn't making meetings or counting days—I was just not drinking. After spending the latter decades of the twentieth century mostly drunk or hungover I woke up one morning, all pukey and achy, and realized that when I drank I simply forfeited my soul. I can't speak for anyone else; nor would I want to. I simply didn't want to drink any longer. My life's nothing earth-shaking, just pouring drinks at night and not drinking them during the day; but I'm happy—not ecstatic or gushing, just contented. I sobered up too late for Margie but just in time to hold my father's hand as he stumbles toward the grave.
       As I looked across the table at my brother I witnessed an odd feeling of displacement. It wasn't that I disliked him or held a grudge because he'd left me alone to care for the old man. Feelings like that would have been a relief. What I felt was precisely and specifically nothing. I had more in common with my regular bar customers than I did with my own brother.
       "I've got some things to settle with the old man," said Will. "Things to settle. Settle."
       "Good luck."
       "I know. He's always been such an iron-clad prick."
       "That's not what I mean."
       "It always been easier for you. He and mom made all their mistakes on me."
       "That's right, I'm the Golden Boy."
       "It was a tough thing to be raised by the people they were then."
       Ten years older than myself, Will had always regaled me with stories of how tough it had been for him, growing up. But after I'd moved dad into Bountiful Manor I'd looked through shoeboxes filled with old photographs and Will was dressed well, there were pictures at Disneyland, water skiing, winter hiking in Yosemite, new bikes at various Christmases. For some unknown reason, Will craved the accomplishment of having survived an unpleasant upbringing that no one but he seemed to remember. I said, "That's not what I mean, Will. He's really just not there anymore. He's a body wracked with pain; the pain swathed in drugs."
       "You were always so dramatic."
       For the tenth time he offered me some red wine. I shook my head and said, "The other day he said to me, 'I can recall exactly what I paid for a wristwatch in the Market Street Woolworth's in nineteen twenty-eight, but I can't remember if I've eaten breakfast.' How's that for drama?"
       Will slurped down half his wine. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
       "You'll find out tomorrow. Get some sleep."
       "I'm gonna watch some tube."
       "Suit yourself."
       
       Bountiful Manor was a spacious, yellow 1940's two-storey in San Francisco's Sunset District. It overlooked a park. Its lawns and shrubs were beautifully maintained, but it was neither Bountiful nor Manorial, it was a residence filled with seven people in pain and afraid to die. There existed an uneasy community of children—all of us in our forties or older—who had housed their aged parents at these quarters. Most of us visited daily and we greeted each other with a polite nod or smile; eyes generally averted, knowing what we'd see if eye-contact were made. We all exchanged fruit baskets and Sees candy last Christmas, amazed that our parent had made it another year. The joint filled the niche between a retirement community and a hospital ward. There were two wheelchair-bound—one of them on oxygen—three with walkers, and one ambulatory.
       Then there was my father who should have been using a walker but was too stubborn and proud. Will would be shocked by his appearance. The big Pollack had dwindled away to, maybe, a hundred pounds. His face looked like he'd gone a couple of rounds with Jack Dempsey—which he did at Newport News Shipyard while in the Navy during WWII. It was a War Bonds exhibition—the Champ doing his part for the cause—and one of the highlights of my old man's life. But now, because the stubborn old guy wouldn't use a walker he constantly took face-first dives into chairs and coffee tables. He wore false teeth and last week's header busted two chompers from his upper plate. I managed to shave him twice a week and keep him groomed up, but he looked a mess.
       And he smelled like death.
       It does have a smell, you know. A sour metallic odor that comes from everywhere and nowhere; it's just there—a palpable companion to the aged and dying. A feeling akin to the displacement I felt for Will is what I felt for father; it's not a sad thing—but a hollow thing—waiting for someone to die.
       Wanting.
       Wanting, actually, for them to die so that you could erase the memories of their drooling, their leaky piss-pipes, falls, and frailty. Then you could love them as you used to.
       In many ways my mother, who had died more than a decade ago—sudden heart attack, again, ironical—was more alive to me than the man I visited daily and had run out of tears for. That may be a terrible thing to say, but it's a true thing. And, I think, a natural thing.
       Self preservation. A defense mechanism.
       A married couple, Bob and Maria, of boundless energy and enthusiasm ran Bountiful Manor. They were in their thirties, way too young to deal with senility, bedsores, and death on a daily basis. I don't see how anybody would or could. But they operated a house with smells of homecooking and flowers and Lysol that nearly masked the acrid odors of dying and incontinence.
       Maria greeted us at the door and led us to father's room.
       Dad didn't recognize Will.
       "It's Will," I said.
       "It's me Dad," said Will.
       Father sat in his recliner, tv blaring. "Huh?" he said.
       "It's your son Will," I said, shocking my brother with the volume needed to communicate with father. I turned down the tv; no remote. I'd bought him a new set about a year ago but he couldn't get the hang of the remote. Luckily, I hadn't tossed the old one and reinstated it after I found him watching Ren & Stempy closed captioned; in Spanish.
       "It's me Dad. Will."
       There is a move I've seen many old folks make. They know they aren't remembering something that should never have been forgotten and they freeze—deer in the headlights—and their mouth drops open and their eyes flit frantically back-and-forth trying to access cobwebbed information banks. Then the recollection, if it returns at all, blooms slowly across their face. You can see them sluggishly return from the netherland of senility, like one of those huge, flippered turtles exiting the sea. Father said casually, "Oh, Will. Are you still in the Marines?"
       "No. I left the Marines in the seventies."
       "I remember John Hraig was in the Marines. Big Bohunk, after the war lived off of Silver Avenue. Did you know him?"
       "That was before I was born."
       "Lie to him," I said.
       "Sure. You knew him—"
       "I never met him."
       And so the conversation goes: my sad, addled parent arguing with his Prodigal Son about whether he knew the Big Bohunk who died in Korea, 1953. I know this because one of my recent activities is piecing together names and places and events from before I was born. After visiting with father I'd call my Aunt Elisa—who still lived in San Francisco in the house she and my mother grew up in—and ask her questions:
       When did the Geary Street cable car barn burn down?
       1932.
       Which of your brothers had season tickets to the S. F. Seals?
       Your Uncle Herman, but he was banned from Seals Stadium after he called Joe DiMaggio a guinea cocksucker and dumped a beer on him.
       Who was Frank Kennsington? Dad keeps mentioning him.
       Your mother's first husband. He was a hopeless drunk and she got an annulment.
        Auntie Ellie; a wealth of information.
       As their conversation continued I examined father's room. I retrieved his cane from where he hid it everyday—under the bed—if he couldn't see it, I suppose in his mind, he didn't need it. Then I put all the closet doorknobs back together. He took them apart every night. He also disassembled watches and radios. This appeared to be a continuation of a trend that had begun three or four years ago. Spry and active, even in his late eighties, he started eradicating. He chopped down an oak tree that had thrived in our backyard and dynamited the stump. Then, front yard and back, he dug up the lawn, shrubs, and roses and installed white rock. The houseplants—including mother's orchids—were unceremoniously tossed. A continual war—snipping, clipping, and spraying—raged against the neighbor's ivy spurting between the slats of father's back fence. I finally realized, one night at work while mindlessly polishing glassware, why he did this, this removal. He couldn't talk to anyone. After mother's death he was incredibly isolated and alone: and this wasn't a condemnation on my part, it was the residue of a life lived according to the rules of his generation. While buffing beer mugs I grasped that he would continue to remove and eliminate everything in his life until only the two most important things existed for him: the memory of tracers etching the night sky over Guadalcanal and the exquisite mystery and tragedy of my mother's death. My part—still buffing, shining—I discovered was that of a witness to this eradication. Not a companion, confidant, or confessor.
       Witness.
       A witness to this unspoken declaration of his fear of imminent, impending death. Spectator to the mute and systematic dismantling of his home, his garden, and his life. This is why, every morning, I could patiently and exactingly reassemble the doorknobs he dismantled every night. He knew he was dying and those knobs were the only unraveling he could still accomplish without pain.
       Doorknobs.
       I thought of doorknobs and heard my brother say to my father: "Remember those snowmen we built every year in Yosemite?"
       "Yes."
       "On the same spot, every year. By the waterfall that never froze. Remember?"
       "Of course I do." He smiled his goblin's smile and slid into silence. I smiled back at my father; by not saying a single word about death he'd taught me how to live. And then I smiled at my brother and wished father, or myself, or anyone, could extend that gift to him.
       Will said, "I just need to say, to have you hear me tell you. That I love you. And I'm sorry I haven't been home since mother died. I am sorry. That's all I need to say."
       Will had his arm around the frail, failing old man. My father gazed over his eldest son's shoulder, out the window to the trimmed, flowering, sunlit garden and said, "What part of Canada are we in?"
       Most times, it's too late to say what you need to.
       Sometimes, it's impossible.

Copyright 2006 by Rob Loughran