The True Cost
I wish someone had told me the true cost of taking care of my parents. That it would be a cost greater than the sum of its parts. That to survive and then emerge from it would itself be one of the great costs to bear. That I might have to bear the cost for the rest of my life.
So I wish for it. I wish someone had told me the true cost of coming home to take care of my parents.
A short story from the end
I had never been so happy to see my dad.
It was three months into the shelter in place of 2020. The streets were still mostly empty. The world was mostly quiet. And my spontaneous, indoor visits to see my dad were a thing of the past. Sitting beside him, placing a hand on his arm, listening to music together—just being with him—all of it was gone.
Instead, I’d go jogging by his place, peeking through these floor-to-vaulted-ceiling windows for the chance at a glimpse of him. But always, no luck, not on the world’s side, and not on mine. Still, I’d go anyway.
Because it was what I had. With no contact of any kind—visual, written, spiritual—it started feeling like I didn’t have a dad anymore. Like he was already gone. I knew he wasn’t, but it felt like it.
Which pretty much sums up the last few years with my dad anyway. He’d changed so much, forgotten so much, although he managed to still be the simultaneously charming and aggravating dad I’ve always remembered. He wasn’t my dad anymore, but still, he kind of was.
And then one day, I went jogging by his place and one of the staff happened to be outside.
“Do you want to see your dad?”
Schrödinger’s Father
How many pieces of proof does it take to convince you that somebody is the person they say they are? Two? Three?
“Hi, Dad,” I say, well, I say to my dad.
“Hi, Daniel,” the man seated behind the floor-to-ceiling window says back to me through a phone.
That is in fact, my name.
One.
How do you start over?
This is the question that is on my mind when I wake up. It’s still the question when I brush my teeth in the morning. When I brush my teeth in the evening, it will still be the question on my mind.
I suppose one place to start is the admission that my world around me has crashed and burned and is not much more than a sea of smoldering bits and pieces.
That seems so dramatic and unnecessary though. I am literally typing in a room with a roof over my head and a carpet under my feet and furniture I could lie down on and a whole host of other things that some people would die to have like a refrigerator that I could stock with several weeks’ full of food if I didn’t choose to live week by week.
So one of these feelings is the facade. The metaphor, or the reality.
What is a decade
A Honda Odyssey is just a minivan. Rock Dust Light Star is a song by Jamiroquai. A decade is ten years.
The year is 2011. The date feels like a distant memory because it is. It was ten years ago, and you wonder what ten years from now will be like, and if it too, will one day feel like a distant memory.
Scenes from a Broadway Plaza
There’s a list of things people need during a pandemic and I’m sure that jewelry is near the bottom of that list.
And yet, in the year of covid, there is a line outside Tiffany’s ready to prove me wrong, day in and day out.
I do not know any of these people and I wonder what are the discussions that precipitate people to line up, up to ten groups at a time, not quite six feet apart, at this particular corner of Main and Mount Diablo.
Choosing Random Chance
It’s June in the year of covid.
I haven't seen my dad in three months. It’s not that I’m counting; I just know it's three because that's how long shelter-in-place has lasted, which I am absolutely counting.
Rationale tells me that my dad is alive and well. Email updates are my evidence, updates from his memory care center about him, the facility, everything they're doing to keep the place clean, safe, and pandemic-free.
Ode to Sweet Tomatoes
Sometimes I wonder if someone else is in charge of my brain.
Why else would I find myself in front of Sweet Tomatoes, on a Friday morning when Sweet Tomatoes isn’t even open yet, not that I have anyone to eat with, not that I’d be eating with anyone right now. I mean this because there’s a pandemic going on, and more importantly, because the pandemic is why Sweet Tomatoes is closed. Permanently.
The building is there. The sign is there. The flyers detailing the extra covid-19-related precautions are there. But all of it is just a grave, a shell, a decaying skeleton.
One Trip Around the Sun
Twenty-four hours to a day, and then three hundred sixty-five of those, plus a slight bit more.
One rotation around the sun, the Earth, itself, rotating along its own invisible axis.
One year, and we are back to where we started, more or less in the exact same place in the void of space. Of course, other things aren’t the same: the other planets of our solar system are in different places for one, and who knows what else has happened in the universe. A ton of things have happened on our own planet. A ton of things have happened in my own life.
Re-post: Running out of breath
Life is like a race, you have to keep running, putting one foot front of the other. That’s what the teachers and coaches tell you. That’s what the business success seminars will tell you. The rules of success are fairly simple. Run the race with as much determination and speed as you can, and you will go far.
Unfortunately, when you are an African-American in America, you get two sets of rules. Not long after graduating college I broke one of the rules from the other ‘guidebook’. Do not run after dark.