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call our overlap—solidarity, communion?
Or. Just call it a lifetime of memory. And give me some image to
assign to these few shared successive hours. I don’t care what
image. A photo album will work. An old reel of 8 mm film will work,
too. Or, yes, sure, a little postcard, a painting of seagulls dive
bombing for breakfast. Yes, that will definitely work. Wedge it in
the bathroom mirror frame. Forget about it. No. Don’t. Please
don’t, ever. I don’t care. Not everything can be objectified. Just
hand me a father to have forever when arbitrary things like
misinterpreted train schedules force submission.
    But. Take all of that, that whole thing, and wrap it
into one big image. Something enough, you know. Something bold and
beautiful for both of us. Like maybe there’s some kind of skyward
woman. Yeah. Grace of not-God. Not a ghost. Not a mermaid. But more
than an apparition she is out somewhere in the fields singing to
herself with everything you never told us. She is limber in her
work and asks only for rain. I don’t know who she is. You never
really said. But I don’t need to question things that help. What I
know is, when she’s here, with you, with me, the wraiths recede.
They go as soon as they hear her mandolin.
    And so what if anyone knows my father is not my
father anymore—except that he is, but changing.
    Just after dark, on a bike, in September trees seem
whiter than black but fading. We cannot wait to get past the
present. Except that then he will be gone. There will be only photo
albums. No 8 mm reels of film. No big, beautiful skyward woman. So
I am coming home to be there, readied for the grief. I sort
memories. There are backyard memories, kitchen memories, piano
bench memories, Dairy Queen memories, hallway memories, front yard
memories, memories from his work, memories from my school. Finally
I walk into the bedroom, Mom and Dad’s bedroom, and find a few
accessible memories there. With one foot on the floor, asleep
before dinner, Dad is stretched out on his back taking a nap in the
half-light. Thousands of times he lay like this. His image is
etched somewhere deep in the everyday meld of what seems right,
good, and just. I will never see him that way again. The house is
sold.
    I hear her holler from the fields, “Keep it in the
same tense, Missy.” And I laugh as the time twists over its Möbius
swirl. It is all now and all removed from time as well. He is lying
on the bed at home. He is lying on the couch. He is lying on the
cot at Riverhead. He is lying on the floor in the living room. You
say they are memories. And so be it. But what part of life would
you choose to be most vivid when he is lying in a nursing home,
dying? The past is certainly present; it’s what I choose.
    I hate to think you wake up unsure. Do you know what
is happening, Dad? Do you blame an insidious enemy for your
flailing arms, blind aggression, and sweat? Sometimes I sit here,
seven hours apart, thinking of you there, in that chair that gets
sterilized twice a day. But then I think of you there in the orange
chair in the living room at home or sitting in a chair at our
kitchen table grading papers. You had slow times then, didn’t you?
So that eases the burden of how slow your time is now.
    She strums a G chord. “Keep it in the same tense,
Missy.”
    It is tense.
    For some reason, the idea of your
dying bothers me less than the fact that you will never again pour
a bowl of Cheerios, top it with Quaker Honey Granola, two spoons of
sugar, and milk. You will never have a dripping nose while
shoveling snow in the driveway. You will never raise your eyebrows
and smile after tickling my feet. You will never stand between me
and the television at the most crucial point in a plot. You will
never stamp your feet inside the door after coming in from the
weather. You will never look skyward through countless vultures
spiraling down on an updraft while driving seventy miles per hour
on the interstate. You will stop looking