Home Office Chronicles 6

The view out my window is directly behind my laptop screen so I’m constantly provided with that happy-making natural light and the soothing green of the garden. It lifts my spirits and, I think, helps me write happy emails. This afternoon my Dad is adding background to my view with his narrative in the dining room where he's carrying on a lengthy one-sided conversation. The narration could be out of my childhood, I’ve heard the story many times, how he lost the farm, not to the bank but to the Russians, how he went to prison, not for a crime but for being on the losing side of a war, how that prison was not a building but a mine in Siberia and how that when he walked home from there five years later he found his family farm belonged not to his family but to the winners of that war and how he "didn’t get a dime, not one dime!" for the land but had to walk to Germany into the arms of a refugee camp.

I walked by the dining room table and saw he had a magazine open, AARP, with an ad showing a woman smiling, someone who looked like a good listener. I asked Dad who he was talking to. "She" pointing at the woman in the ad and then closing the magazine and getting up. He had finished his bowl of spaghetti-Os and prepared to go for a walk.

Of course I feel guilty that I don’t spend more time with Dad. Of course old age is lonely even when you have someone feeding you, someone puttering around the house, someone you share a history with, even if that history is long forgotten. Dad looks at me and blinks and I know he is trying to remember who I am. Then he remembers, a spark still glows in a wizen head. He ambles out the door into the sunlight, stomps about a while with his cane punctuating every step on the wooden porch. He walks down the steps and gives his cane a jaunty twirl as he heads out into the treeline with a dog trailing him at a safe distance.