“Who’s that little man in a bunnet?” my dad says with vague interest. He’s talking about Onias who has returned from the shops. Onias from Zimbabwe has come from Tescos in Haddington with tangerines and McVities biscuits and yes, the man who lives with my father and cares for my father, is wearing a flat cap.
Of course it’s raining and of course the wind is blowing. The beech hedges which line these country roads gird vainly against it; the sky reflects in their sodden leaves that patch the pavements.
Though there aren’t many pavements here, and on our way to the little wood behind my father’s house, Francie and I pick along the hedgerow which has rose hips mixed in with the beech.
It’s 3:30; the light is going down.
“Are you sure you know how to find our way out?” Francie says as we totter like elderly folk across mud and roots, down into the darkness.
“No,” I say.
But I knew that wood once. I knew it when my father was with me and we had a dog beside. Rain and an oily coat. Rain dripping from the brim of his cap. Raindrops on his glasses. Rain on his boots. Rain weeping into his socks, inking up the legs of his trousers.
“Who are you?” my dad says a bit later when Onias comes in with two little oranges on a plate. “What are you called?”
“Did your father know you,” people asked on my return. “Was he glad to see you?”
The answer to the first is ‘no.’ But it may not be as simple as that.
‘Darling’ is a flexible term, a handy cover when ‘Alexa,’ the name he came up with a half-century ago in a maternity ward on the bank of the Thames, has long escaped him.
“That’s a lovely bum, darling,” he says when I bend to pick up a piece of peel.
I am glad of this. It’s funny. We laugh. Anything to divert from the hands – frailed by time – which still can find their way around an orange.
Francie and I tell my dad we will be back tomorrow. We return to our ‘glamp’ which is a tiny pod so small we have to move the kitchen table to set the bed up. But the view stretches across from green to green, and me and my best friend can talk forever.
We end our day in stitches. Come time for bed when we remove our respective ‘aids,’ she can’t hear and I can’t see. She stops answering my questions, and barely bothers with modesty when she gets undressed. We say we need a third monkey. Between us – sans eyes and ears – we’re two-thirds complete. And two-thirds old, she says.
Is it wrong of me. . .Is it terrible to say that dementia has its benefits? That I am so grateful for the way it changes the contours of time, and the definition of honesty? Is it wrong to be so pitifully thankful that ‘tomorrow’ means nothing anymore? Or that it means everything? It is now and five minutes from now; it is yesterday. And all of a sudden, “Goodbye” isn’t quite so hard.
We did go tomorrow. But we didn’t go the tomorrow after that because I was on a train to London, spinning through hills, further and further from yesterday. Farther and farther from the “tomorrow” I’d said, but couldn’t mean.
“I love London,” my dad said to me as I was doing up my coat. “I lived there. I know it.”
AB - 9.11.23
The cadence here...xo
Alexa, this is one of my favs. Not just the reference to the ever lovely F but a reminder of some of the humour, more often unintentional, that can accompany dementia - lovely bum! Lets speak soon. XXX