First Light of Dawn

Sometimes a story begins at the first breaking light of dawn, and sometimes not until the dark bitter hours just before.

Today is my dad’s eighty-eighth birthday. He looks remarkably good for a man born on July 24, 1919. We had planned a large birthday party for him. No one showed up except for my brother and me.

My dad has Alzheimer’s, but I sensed he was expecting more than Jack and I when we entered the Steak and Ale restaurant near the rest home where he lives. He glanced around the room, as if looking for someone to jump up and yell surprise. No one did. My brother is sixty-three, and I am sixty and the dinner caused me to ponder my own mortality.

My mom died last November, a victim of cancer and fate. She had a quick mind until the day she died and could always remember the past’s vaguest detail. My brother Jack and I, it seems, are more like our dad.

Yesterday we took Dad for a doctor’s visit. His doctor is a tiny, but beautiful, Chinese woman who specializes in geriatrics and gerontology.

“He isn’t getting enough mental stimulation,” she said, “Nor enough exercise.”

“Dad is shy,” we told her. “He is the only man in the place. He is lonely, and bored.”

She looked at me, and then my brother. Her expression needed no interpretation. I understood her question and I know Jack also did. She did not expect an answer and I am positive that she read our faces as clearly as we had hers.

Leaving her office yesterday, my dad grabbed his groin and winced.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I haven’t had much exercise lately,” he answered.

Tonight, he grabbed his groin at the dinner table, the expression on his face that of pain. Dad is from a generation that does not make waves, faces his pain with stoicism. Still, it was apparent on his face.

You okay?” I asked again for the second time in two days.

“Not enough exercise,” he answered again.

When I left the old man at his room in the nursing home, I sensed a feeling within him. I think it was acceptance. At his age, he has rarely seen a doctor, or been sick. He is lucky. Or is he?

Living in a small area with only women, all more incapacitated than himself, the days must be endless, the inability to understand the quagmire immersing him even more devastating to what remains of his fragile psyche.

I do not really know where I am going with this story. As I peck it out on my keyboard, I wonder – where am I at my present stage of life? At sixty years of age, it is obviously not my first breaking light of dawn, but how many dark hours remain until the circle reconnects?

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