not-so-sticky

Down and Out in Kingston, New York.

 Authentic + Affordable! How can I deny this authentic Upstate experience? At last, I found a place I can afford to live! I can't afford to buy a real home because I'm in publishing.  This cozy camper is one-of-a-kind! Located beneath the shade of a weeping willow tree, she stays cool all spring, right up to summer! Conveniently located next door to all amenities * , I'm ready to pack it up and move on in! An outdoor refrigeration unit is located conveniently next to exit! ** I'll keep my food cold all winter without the unnecessary expense of electric. Hear that, Niagara Mohawk? ConEd! Central Hudson! Down with the lot of you! A little duct tape will cover up the holes on the windows and doors. Once we get the padlock off the door, it's otherwise in ready to move-in condition .*** You really must see it to believe it! I'll have a housewarming as soon as I'm settled. *2 miles from a public restroom at a full-service gas station. **Ever...

Last night, I found myself planted on the couch in my living room with a gummi worm hanging out of the side of my mouth. I wondered just how long before one of my little hell monkeys would wander by and notice? As a child, I maintained the false belief, as I suspect many children do, that my father was an infallible, rational being. Therefore, everything he said must be universally true and right. Father knows best. Now that I'm a parent, I realize how fallacious this belief was. I'm taller. I pay taxes. I've evolved but I'm still the same weird kid on the inside that I've always been. As I grew older, the world unveiled realities outside of my own microcosm and what this world reflected was that my own was more than a bit askew. My father had a lot of eccentricities that I never thought twice about until many years later. The ride home was quiet and still, highlighted by Bob's humming. It wasn't many years later that I learned 'Starry, Starry N...

My father is 70 years old. What he owns can fit into a small bedroom. There are hundreds of business cards, wrapped up with rubber bands; soaps and shampoos, collected from motels; beer coasters he habitually nabbed from bars; a large Xerox box full of maps; a variety of adhesive he used during his sock-gluing phase, among a variety of other odds and ends that had somehow called to him. In all of these items, I am aware of something intrinsically 'Bob' in all of them. To an outsider, they would signify little. But what stands out the most in this room is an object lately untouched by Bob: a plain hard-covered, black brief case. The brief case that carried back and forth various documents from the Federal building in Albany, the mysterious case I was not to touch on pain of death. I recall it being a source of mystery for me. What could be so very important in that black brief case...? The brief case left me deflated. At the end of the day, is that all there is..? Now here I w...

And clearly, I didn't. When I look back at when my father first moved in with me, I cringe. I expected more from him than he was capable. He had only recently stopped driving (a blog, for another time...). He had been home most of the time alone, sometimes for days, nights, while his partner was away at work. I wonder now what those days and nights passed alone were like for him. At first, I thought he was OK to leave home alone; he simply needed visual cues.   This one served as a reminder to Bob to eat lunch while I was at work. I littered the house with pointers. Nothing fancy. Simply Sharpee-scribbled reminders of who he was,  what to do, and where to go on colored construction paper. Bob's Room.   Bathroom.   STOP! Bob! Stay inside the house!   Attic.   Stupidly, at first, I sometimes left him in the house with notes in 'joke' format, like 'Hey Bob, don't leave the house! The police are looking for you!" which would have been really funny if m...

Sasquatch!

Bob's most quiet time of the day is the morning. While words often escape him in the evening, the morning is relatively coherent, when a dialogue is still possible. The panic does not settle into Dad's eyes until the sun begins to set on the day. This morning, his head was resting on the back of the couch, and his eyes were closed. He was quiet. The couch pillows were arranged so that the ones which were supposed to go behind him were instead piled up on top of him. He clutched the over-sized pillow close to his body, hugging it tightly to his chest. Only his glasses peeked out over the top, the rest of his face hidden by the pillow. Dana and I were sitting on the other side of the room on the love seat, engrossed by our digital devices. The morning show was droning on in the background but none of us were minding it. The children had already been shuffled off to school so the house was unusually peaceful. With his eyes still closed, Bob said dreamily, "When I close my eye...

"guy with no arms" by lilith arden soechting, age 3.

 This is a picture of my dad in the barracks on an Air Force base.  The back of the photo reads:  BARRACK'S LIFE IS RUGGED! The handwriting isn't my Dad's, though, and he also wouldn't have mispunctuated.

Often Dad's reality is mismatched from the moment actually transpiring to a moment from long ago. In addition to the Alzheimer's diagnosis, Dad has recently been plagued with pneumonia, and other random viruses passed along to him from his goobie grandchildren who are laden with germs so he's been more confused than usual. Sometimes it seems like my father is already gone. In truth, he cannot do any of the things he once loved to do. He spends most of his time on a couch in a living room and cannot find his way back to the living room once he wanders out of it. Attempts at dialogue are a challenge. Dad talks with me like his words are making sense but more often than not lately, they are not. Other days, he cannot talk at all. I recently began scanning Dad's old photographs from his Air Force photo album. One of my regrets is that my father kept some mementos and photographs but that their story could 'die' with him. Most of his photographs are not nota...

Before my father moved in with me, I'd occasionally go up to Cambridge to spend the weekend with him while Barbara was working. "So, are you planning on spending the night tonight?" he'd ask. When I'd announce I was spending the entire weekend, he would look overjoyed, "Oh! Good, good! So..., you'll be here all weekend, then? That's great!" Sometimes, he would ask me this more than once and when he realized it, he would simply laugh and say, "I already asked you that, didn't I? Why am I repeating myself?" and he'd laugh, and then drink another glass of wine. I'm not quite sure why - if his intention had been to regulate his amount of drinking? - but he often drank wine out of a small juice glass. Unfortunately, he had a tendency to continually refill his juice glass. It was difficult to tell whether his drinking confounded his memory, or his memory confounded his drinking. It's hard to know. Today, Dad asked me, "A...

For many years, I mocked my father for the trail of enigmatic notes that littered our home. They never made much sense to me so it was easy for me to poke fun at them. But the older I become, the more I appreciate how genius this truly was. His notes were obviously a part of his master plan to overcome his memory loss. Written in his own hand, he was not required to rely on his degrading memory. He would remember anything - and everything - by writing a note about it which he could simply refer to later. Who needs a memory with a trail of documentation? I think this one may be my favorite - a typical Bob Brown grocery list. Guinness Stout and Scotch tape. He wrote this one shortly after he moved in with us - hence, our address on it as well. Dad used to walk up to Rite Aide in Cambridge every day, when he was still able, and alternately purchase rubber bands, paper clips, and scotch tape. A cashier told me this one day when I was with him, and Barbara confirmed he had an ever-growing c...

My father had systems that baffled me for years. I didn't understand them, and often what we don't understand, we tend to mock. It was much easier to poke fun of his enigmatic reminders and notes scattered over every inch of our home than it was for me to try and understand why there were notes.  Sometimes, I feel angry that he never discussed his memory problems with me until we could no longer have a dialogue about them. Feeling somewhat frustrated, I asked him the other day, fruitlessly, "Why didn't you ever talk to me about your memory problems?"  And he looked at me with this pleading look of confusion,  I never knew that I had a memory problem!   Whose fault is it that we never had a discussion about this? Is it his, or is it really mine?  When I was younger, it was easy to make jokes about it. One Christmas, when I was in my early 20's, I bought him a book on how to improve his memory as a joke. I thought it was funny. I don't think it is so funny...

"Daddy! Look! Someone took the ice cube!" Lil stared despondently into her purple cup as Seth began to snigger. "Ha! No, Lily, it melted..." "It melted ?"

"What I would like is a piece of ice, something that would make me hungry right now for at least two hours...oh well..." Bob sighed . "Such is life." Dad and I are sitting on the sofa, enjoying a surprisingly sedate moment. Any moment in my house that is sedate is a surprise. I can hear Lil and Liam pestering Dana in the kitchen. He's breaking open pistachios for them - a tedious chore. Seth is upstairs, being his reclusive teen-aged self. I'm poking around online while Dad is chattering. He's peering over my shoulder at the screen of my laptop, resting in my lap on the couch. We already ate dinner, and are lazying about in our pajamas. "Why is it that when you are hungry, you are really hungry? but that when you're not so hungry, you're not. It just seems so strange that it is this way. I mean, I was just wondering what I was going to be eating tonight. not that I'm going to be eating tonight... because it's just too cold to go out...

i feel this way myself sometimes, liam.

The proprietor of Hudson Coffee Traders is awesome, indeed! He kindly acquiesced to my demands for a larger 'Alex' sized cup of coffee! One evening, an anonymous comment was posted on my former blog - Day 188 - simply asking, "What size would give you the caffeine boost you need?" I called Kyrce on the phone almost immediately. "What size do you think would make the 'perfect' size coffee cup? Ideally? What did they used to have at the Citgo before it shut down?" This was very important. Just recently, I had ingested the largest size cup available at Hudson Coffee Traders by the time we hit New Paltz on our commute to USR. Two stops on the way to work wouldn't work, if we were ever to be on time! Kyrce is great because I can call her and ask her stupid things and she doesn't suggest they are stupid. We discussed various coffee sizes available at various vendors and settled on 20 ounces. 20 ounces is the perfect sized cup to get you from Hud...

My father never knew what to do with me. I lived alone with him from the age of 10 on, and I realize he really did the best he could as a single father with a preteen daughter. I wouldn't have wanted to trade places with him. Now that I'm on the caregiver side, I'm more empathetic with his motives even if the actions sometimes seemed askew. He was concerned with my well-being and success, and tried to point me in the right direction, but I imagine it was hard for him to know what the right direction was. Unfortunately, growing up has unmasked the illusion that parents always know best. We can aim to be good parents but it's a constant practice, not an end goal of perfection to be attained. As the primary caregiver of my father, I practice to be a good caregiver. But I will be the first to admit that my practice falls short from time to time. With diligence, I pick up and try again. And so did Dad. Again, and again. And that really is something. * * * The importa...

Fear not, dear reader! I have not disappeared! However, I am participating in this year's NaNoWrimo . The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month of November. There are no claims that your novel is actually 'good'; the only requirement of 'winning' is to complete 50,000 words. January is for revising... With a full-time job, a father with Alzheimer's, two kids under the age of 3, a teenager, and a Dana, it's a bit tricky. And I'm afraid, next to impossible to maintain both a blog and a novel! Unfortunately, I'm supposed to have hit the mid-way point already but I'm stuck at word count 8,618...My characters are ambling about at the moment, trying to find their way around...or way out... I'll be back in December to tell you of my success! alex not writing...but the interruption was so sweet.

I've been meaning to take Dad sneaker shopping. His current sneakers are a nondescript gray pair that Velcro shut. Dad always had a preference for the plain. The Velcro is very handy but there isn't much in the way of support for his arch. Just a bland, ordinary gray sneaker. Lately, I've been hiding his sneakers from him. It's far more comfortable to lounge around the house without shoes. I also take his shoes, though, because he is less likely to wander outside without shoes. I will not say it's entirely impossible, but it's far less likely. A couple of nights ago, I was helping Dad was sitting get ready for bed. He was sitting on the edge of his bed. I kneeled down on the floor in front of him and unstrapped his shoes so that he wouldn't wear them to sleep. I pulled the shoes off of his feet and turned to set them on the other side of the door that leads up to the attic so that they would be out of Bob's field of vision. "That's odd..." ...

Lil put a new spin on an old nursery rhyme today. We were sitting on the edge of my bed, dressing Liam, when she launched into song. patty cake, patty cake, baker's man - bake me a cake as fast as you can. pat it! roll it! and put it in the microwave! and oh! yeah! put a 'b' on it! Our children (and I mean this collectively) are the product of an expedient age. Expediency, however, is not necessarily a good thing. Putting a cake in the microwave may 'bake' it faster, but it's definitely not going to taste very good. However, I can certainly see why Lil might be in a hurry to get her cake baked...

It should be obvious to you by now that I recently bought a scanner.

I recently bought a scanner so I've been scanning all of my old treasures. In my scrounging around for fun items, I uncovered the best postcard I have ever received. Postcard writing is a lost art, and my father was a masterful postcard artist. This was a postcard I received from him when I was 11 years old. I was on a Girl Scout bike trip from Fort Ann to Saratoga and back again. It rained the entire time I was on this bike trek so I'm particularly glad this item survived the trek. I remember smelling like mildew for several days... The 'ugly doll' he references was my beloved Cabbage Patch doll... [And for those of you who didn't realize 'Alex' was not my first name growing up, I think you'll understand why I abandoned it, and I don't want to hear any comments about it!!!]

Neither Lil nor Liam have ever had a 'professional' photograph taken in a 'studio'. I currently have over 3800 pictures of my family on Flickr so I think I have it covered... home-grown photo of liam taken by alex at forsythe park. However, my sister-in-law, Christine, has studio photos taken frequently. She has already had photographs of my three-month-old niece, Rae, taken twice ! I've never pulled it off once ! I've always been impressed with Christine's ability to both organize and execute group events. If it was not for her, my brother's visits would be no more than the two of us getting together under one roof to nap (the first hour of our visit together, the two of us spent napping). Christine knows this. So, she scheduled the appointment at Sears and posted the details on my Facebook 'wall'. All the cousins were to get their photo taken together at Sears on Saturday at 5. Seth narrowly escaped this event as he is visiting family out-of-t...

I'm not a spontaneous person. I'm sorry if that doesn't make me much fun, but I grew up with my father, and if you know my father, you know that spontaneity not only did not come to him; it angered him. He always said that if he had ever been given a surprise party, he would have turned right around and walked back out the door in the other direction. He said that anytime in his life there had ever been a surprise, it had been a bad one. Never a good one. Boredom was a 'good'; it meant that nothing bad was happening to you. Every moment was planned. We didn't do anything without discussing it, planning it. Sometimes he wouldn't even answer the door when my Uncle Bill would stop by unannounced - because he hadn't called us first. Of course, had Uncle Bill called, Dad would have told him not to come... So, it is with this nature that I tend to look at life, too. I like to know what is going to happen, in the order it is going to happen, from the start of m...