The Man in the Mirror

In the hallway at Creek House is a floor to ceiling mirror that when one walks out of the Green Room, Dad’s room, one walks at themselves. Of course one would ignore such a reflection and hardly even register the mirror after a few passes, however, Dad sees not himself but another person walking towards him.

He is gregarious, so is the other man, he is playful, like the other man, he is prone to social chatter and so he stops…says hello, tips his cap, chats awhile, then gives a two-fingered salute and continues down the hall. This behavior would seem comical, even a source for family jokes but we have reached a point now, he has reached a point now, where it seems his mental state is even below that of the dogs, who pass this mirror and any others without so much as a glance at their reflections. Is it because dogs see with their noses first? That if they don’t smell another dog the dog must not be there even if they see it? Or has Dad lost that part of his brain that intuitively knows what a reflection is? Oddly, he doesn’t find his shaving mirror disorienting. He even ignores other mirrors that are attached to movable objects such as cabinet doors. But the full-length mirror appears to him as another human. And the thing that is so uncanny is that he doesn’t recognize his own stance, his own clothes, his own cap that he tips to the other man. Reason has left him or the ability to reason, the cognitive aspects of reason have left him when confronted with himself in certain mirrors. We hear him chatting and we learn that he is not happy with his existence and ready to "get the hell out of here". He wants to go into his past, back to familiar settings where he remembers the terrain. He wishes the man in the mirror "luck", "good luck".