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.
Rationale tells me that my dad is alive. But it's been three months, three months since I’ve seen him or heard his voice and so it feels like he's gone, in the same way that I haven't seen my mom or heard her voice in almost a year and it feels like she's gone.
Because she is.
It’s getting close to Father’s Day in the year of covid. I still haven’t seen my dad.
I move out of my parents’ house and into a new place. It's not far, only a couple miles away, just a little bit closer into town, closer to shops, closer to my dad.
I’m still in the suburbs, which is not a place you might expect a single, thirty-something without kids to purposefully choose to live. This is no urban city center where you have fifty choices for bars and live music and theatre.
No, this is just a different part of my hometown which really has one thing going for it: It’s closer to my dad. It’s so close, it’s a ten-minute walk to his place. That’s why I chose it.
I guess it’s not that weird to choose to be close to my dad. I did, after all, move in with him and my mom more than three years ago. But it’s weird for me to choose it, a second time.
But I did, and I take advantage of the proximity and walk by his place several times a week.
You can’t see very much from the street. You can see only a little more if you walk through the small parking lot up to the main gate, which opens to a courtyard before you get to the actual building, the only room of which you can see is the activity room—a room with high-vaulted ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows flanking one wall panel in the very middle.
I peer inside each time I walk by. I don’t stay for long—I’d hate to appear creepy at a memory care center of all places—but long enough to scan every face to see that none of them is my dad.
I feel a tinge of disappointment each time, but I’m undeterred.
I keep coming back. Why wouldn’t I? I live so close. It costs me so little—ten minutes and a few calories—for the chance at rolling the dice and seeing if maybe my dad is in the activity room.
That’s why I chose where I live. The proximity.
It seems like it should be so easy to visit the people you care about. You just make a plan to see them and go. But life is so busy, and only seems to get busier as I get older. It’s getting harder and harder to make those plans, to know that those people are also making plans, and hoping that both your calendars’ sync up within the next three months.
The reality is that it’s hard.
There’s so much friction. Is everyone free? Is there traffic? Will there be a sale on plane flights?
There’s so much pressure. Seeing people takes time, money, both of which are increasingly precious. Will seeing them be worth it?
Proximity reduces both of those to zero.
So when I miss my dad, or even when I miss my mom, I put on my shoes and in ten minutes I’m peering past a courtyard gate through some windows for the chance to see my dad. That’s all it is—a chance.
And even though it’s almost Father’s Day and I still haven’t seen him, I keep rolling the dice.
Because if I don’t, then I definitely won’t see him. Those are my choices.
There is a second reason I chose my current place: My brother and his family.
In the time of covid this seems like a mistake, where face-to-face time is being called into question, and one result of this is that my nephews have taken to video calling me over FaceTime on a daily basis.
I never know when they’re going to call, but I almost always pick up. I don’t know why; it’s not like we have much more to talk about today than we did yesterday.
How’s school?
Fine. We’re using Zoom now. Have you heard of Zoom?
I want to tell them I’ve been using Zoom for years. I don’t know if this makes me cool or lame.
Do you know you can mute people on Zoom? We can’t mute you on FaceTime.
No you can’t. Mwa ha ha ha ha—
Hey what if we plug in some headphones?
Hey!
Time doesn’t stop in a pandemic when the rest of life seems to be on pause. My nephews are getting older, and more clever. I try to keep up by fiddling with FaceTime effects and creating columns of stickers and dolling them out as points for whichever nephew tells the best jokes.
Sometimes the calls are fun. Sometimes they’re plain. Sometimes they’re carbon copies of the call from the day before. I have little choice in the matter. In fact, the only choice I have is whether or not I pick up when they call.
So I do.
It seems like you should be able to will memorable moments into existence. But it also seems like the harder you try, the harder an invisible forces pushes back.
So I guess all I can do is make space for those moments to happen, increase the likelihood, the random chance, the odds, so that they may ever be in your favor.
And sometimes, the reality is that they are.
We try a Zoom call with my dad, which works as poorly as expected, which is to say it worked for two minutes before everyone gave up and my dad complained about wanting to go back to doing whatever he was doing—which is to say that this is a strange way to know that my dad is doing just fine.
I’m not sure if he knew what he was looking at, if he could make out our faces on a computer screen, if he thought he was looking at a photo, or if he just couldn’t hear us.
Still, it was a tiny sign that my dad was alive and well.
I can’t ask for much more than that, as Father’s Day is right around the corner.
And yet, I ask for more, and I get it.
I put on my shoes and in ten minutes I’m once again peering past a courtyard gate through some windows for the chance to see my dad. He’s not there.
I’ve rolled the dice and lost, again.
Or so I thought.
“Do you want to see your father?” a voice calls out to me.
I glance around and see just a few cars. A woman gets out of one of them—she’s one of the facility’s caretakers.
“Uh…” is all I can mumble. I don’t know why I stammer. Excitement? Nerves? I don’t want to cause any trouble.
“It’s no trouble,” she says. “He’s in the activity room. I just saw him earlier.”
“…Are you sure? I mean yeah I’d love to say hi but—“
“Come on in.”
She opens the gate and leads me into the courtyard where I wait right outside the windows that are more than twice my height.
I watch her punch a code on the door and head inside, into the activity room, passing by the windows, and then she’s blocked by that one wall panel. I know there are these sofa chairs there—I remember sitting with my dad on them before covid was a thing.
She reappears, talking to someone I can’t see, pointing at me.
And then there he is. An older gentleman, balding, with short, white wispy hair, pushing a walker as he approaches the window. He has a smile which reminds me of my own; half-charming, half-mischievous. It’s his smile. It’s mine.
I wave.
He waves back.
I have no idea what else to do, so I grab my phone and type out some text and make it as large as I can.
How are you?
“Good!” he says, his voice is muffled, but it is his voice.
I erase my text and type more.
Did you drink coffee today? “Yes.”
Did you sleep well? “Yes.”
I grin.
Everyone says hi.
I’ve run out of things and so I circle back and ask him “How are you?” one more time.
“Good!” he says. “Now that you are here.”
I sigh, the smile still plastered on my face.
I have never been so happy to see my dad.
I tell my brother about my luck, and he immediately begins his own habit of rolling the dice, and—as he always does—improving on my ideas.
He starts calling the facility in advance to see if my dad is awake, and if he is, if they can bring him to the activity room so that they can see each other.
This system works well, and the facility staff make it even better by giving my dad a phone so we can talk to each other through the glass. I suppose it’s like prison, but it does work.
We get to hear his voice. He gets to hear ours.
Our conversations are limited, not by time, but by his mental capacity and his low physical energy, so we keep things short. How are you? We miss you. Don’t watch too much TV. What did you eat today?
And then we show him a bunch of photos on our phones through the window. Our mom with her Honda Odyssey. Some family photos. My brother and his kids.
Sometimes my brother and I will stay and chat afterwards. Sometimes we don’t. I don’t think either of us plans it. There are days when we have things to say and we’ll talk about covid or finances or his work or my side projects or we’ll get philosophical and talk about the nature of time, and there are the days when we’ve got nothing. Life just works that way.
But I still show up each time my brother texts me: Going to see dad, with little time in advance, often at random and entirely unplanned.
This of course isn’t a problem, because I live a ten-minute walk away and am almost always home in the time of covid so I can just stroll on over.
It’s another rolling of the dice, and I have no expectations. It might be the quick visit. My dad might have a change of mood and demand to go back to his room. He might be so tired he can’t talk once we’re there. He might say my name, he might not. My brother and I might talk, we might not.
It doesn’t really matter. I still go when I can.
Because even if I can’t will memorable things into existence, I like to make as much space for us to be brothers, and sons, as much as I possibly can.
It’s my dad’s birthday in the year of covid, which is a meaningless virus to him. I tried explaining it once and promptly regretted the waste of energy.
We try to do something special: We buy him Panda Express and a slice of cake, and my nephews write him some birthday cards.
He’s happy to see us, though he doesn’t seem to understand what the fuss is all about and he’s actually more interested in using the bathroom so he disappears for most of the time we’re there standing outside.
I think of Thanksgiving a lot when I think about my dad’s birthday because the two are always so close. My dad always had to preface dinner with a speech about the importance of Thanksgiving and its history of the Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a meal together. I never comment about his speeches because I used to critique him and I’ve since learned my lesson that he doesn’t tell these stories as a history lesson but as nothing more than an idea—a nugget of his wisdom to impart with all of us that it’s good that we’re all here together on this day sharing a big meal with each other.
Those days of him giving speeches seem so far away, but in a way, they’re not.
Because on his birthday, very close to Thanksgiving, for a few minutes, what remains of the generation he helped father and even the generation after that, we are all together, in the courtyard of this building, trying to mime our thoughts and feelings while he eats cake and Panda Express and laughing about the ridiculousness of it all.
And we will keep doing it, every year that he’s still alive.
I grew up learning from all sorts of stories that real men are the masters of their own fortune, that they don’t depend on fate because they build their own.
If I ever bought that idea, I suppose I’ve stopped buying it now.
The truth is I guess I believe in a little bit of random chance, of chaos, of recognizing that odds are odds because then you can at least maximize them in your favor.
Because when I walk by my dad’s place, most days he’s not there. He’s in bed, he’s eating in the dining hall, or he’s hiding behind that one wall panel where I can’t see him.
But there are the days and times where he is there, sitting where I can see him, watching the Andy Griffith show on TV in black and white, and I can see that he is well, interacting with other people, with people to watch over him—which is more than I can do for him now.
And I think, for all the chaos in the world, the unknown with a pandemic, the fear in where my life might be going, sometimes random chance comes together and my dad will be sitting there, right when I walk by, and I will get to see him, and whether or not he gets to see me or hear me or god-forbid even remember me, I will still be reminded that there is, a chance, and that there’s still good in the world.