My father sat in his kitchen, and we talked about football because we were going to spend all day watching games on TV. Sadly he got the names wrong of the football players and the teams as well.
“Who’s Baltimore playing?” he asked.
I’d told him about five minutes ago. I almost yelled at him.
“They’re playing the Raiders, Dad. I thought I told you five minutes ago.”
“That’s right,” he said.
The conversation went on, and he kept getting people’s names wrong. I thought about looking up dementia on the internet, but all that would’ve done was make me more worried. I should’ve learned my lesson after all those years of trying to diagnose myself after looking up diseases online, which was never a good idea for a hypochondriac like me, and that was what I wanted to do for my father.
We sat together in the living room and watched the games. He kept getting the players’ names wrong on the television before he went and picked up pizza.
“Where’s it from?” I asked. I was hoping Domino’s at least.
“It’s from WinCo,” he said.
“WinCo? Isn’t that like a grocery store for poor people?” I couldn’t imagine the pizza tasting any good.
“We order from there all the time,” he said.
What was with my parents to where they would order pizza from a place like that? Pizza, which I hold sacred to me, has to come from a reputable place. When I used to live in Los Angeles, there were great pizza places abound. A New Yorker would argue with me and say there were hardly any good pizza restaurants in that city. But a New Yorker could be snobbish about pizza anyway. Don’t ever mention pineapples when they’re around. Since I don’t hold Coachella Valley as a pizza mecca, I gave up and said, “Okay, we can order from there.” They may as well have ordered from Walmart if Walmart served pizza, which they don’t, but that was the regard I held for WinCo. I’ve never been inside one, but I can only imagine something different from Whole Foods.
When he went to pick up the pizza, I sat in the room with my mother, who was focusing on her iPad on the couch, and I asked her, “What’s with Dad? I know I asked you before about his cognitive functioning.”
And she said, “We’re both losing our minds. You’ll have to watch us because we’re forgetting things more often. Both of us worry about dementia. That’s why I do these crossword puzzles all the time, and your dad spends all day looking up ancestors online to keep his mind going. He doesn’t even bother helping with your financial future because he’s afraid he’ll make mistakes. We don’t have too much to worry about now, but when we don’t know how to start the car, you should be really concerned.”
I worried the time would come sooner than later. They’re knocking on the door of their eighties.
“I can’t sleep much anymore,” she said. “I was drinking cherry tart juice and chamomile tea with licorice root to fall asleep. Everything helped except the licorice root was making me burn too much body fat, so my skin began to sag. I had to stop taking it because I was losing too much weight.”
Wait. Licorice root? It burns fat? What the hell? Sign me up. I ordered it on Amazon right away.
A woman using a walker rolled into the coffee shop this morning, and I thought about my mother and how eventually she’ll have to use one. She has beaten herself up after playing tennis for so many years. She fell the other day on the court. The tread on her shoes was wearing out. I worry about her playing. She’s a klutz. I love her, but she’s still a klutz, and a klutz at her age is playing with fire on the tennis court. To think she’ll have to give up her favorite love someday depresses me. I dwelled over that when she had back surgery six years ago, when she was in the hospital for a week. I had a rough time with her in there. I couldn’t stand to see her unconscious in a hospital bed, so I stayed away from there as much as I could and tried to enjoy the air in Venice Beach near where she stayed. After that long, I still have vivid memories of when she was there and how hard it was for me to cope. But they’re still around, and that’s all that matters. And the pizza from WinCo was actually very good.
