Memory Care
Today I remind my father that he played college ball with Tom Tresh, Rookie of the Year for the 1962 Yankees. “Tommy” Tresh.
My father darkens. He rolls over in bed, slowly, like a bunt going foul. He turns his back to me and faces the wall.
You remember the nicknames we picked in Indian Guides? I ask.
I was Straight Arrow. He was Crooked Arrow.
No answer.
Visiting hours are over.
My father and I sit alone at the small table by the brown coffee dispenser in the dining room of the memory care unit. My father wears his cowboy hat and cocks one eye at the clock in the corner. His lips move and he doesn’t want to look at me. He wavers in his seat like he’s ready to steal second.
He still has hair as thick as Pete Rose. It still covers his ears and hangs long at the back of his cowboy hat.
But these are the last days for us. Straight Arrow and Crooked Arrow.
Of old, lost Charlie Hustle with the slippers by the bed. With the hair as white as cocaine. Death making its way toward the mound, its head down, its cold hands in the pockets of a satin jacket, a little jump for luck over the foul line.
Bird Report
September 16.2022: A woodpecker—red-bellied?—scales the tree outside my office window like a telephone lineman. Cleated feet and a neck like a snapping turtle that stretches to probe the bark to its left or right without moving its body.
To be a witness to the violence of the fallen world is only a matter of shifting one’s attention. The woodpecker finds something, and I swear, Father Wendell, I watch it eat it in chattery tremors of swallowing, the bird’s head convulsing like an electrocuted lineman’s might.