Memory Care
Today I remind my father that he played college ball with Tom Tresh, Rookie of the Year for the 1963 Yankees.
He darkens. He rolls over in bed, slowly, like a bunt going foul. He turns his back to me and faces the wall.
Do you remember the names we picked in Indian Guides? I ask.
Fathers and sons wore headbands with feathers. We had red vests with yellow piping and a patch with a teepee. We learned animal tracks, hand signals.
Sunken living rooms. Basements with bars. The fathers chose the ceremonial names, so my father chose ours.
I was Little Straight Arrow. He was Great Bent Arrow.
Knowing grins.
Do you remember? I ask him.
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 break for home.
*
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 of Great Bent Arrow. Of old, lost Charlie Hustle.
With the slippers by the bed and the hair as white as cocaine and death making its way toward the mound, its head down, its cold hands in the pockets of a satin jacket.
Bird Report
{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.