Smaller All The While

"Your father can't walk anymore."
"What?"
"He can only walk about 50 feet, his back is bad. He has trouble getting food from the store. He's living alone in Florida, maybe you should go down there and help him since you can't get a job."

It was a short flight from Greenville, SC to Orlando, FL. An hour on the flight, I read the in-flight magazine. It said that between the age of 30 and 40 the average man loses an inch in height due to the shrinking and dehydrating of the discs between the vertebrae. I was 33 and getting smaller. Damn. One more year and I would outlive Jesus though, that made me feel better.

My dad was in a one bedroom apartment. I went into his bedroom, there was no bed, no furniture at all in there, just a sheet and blanket and a pillow on the floor and a pile of dirty clothes in the corner. I moved to the kitchen. There was a pile of rusting forks and spoons in the kitchen sink. How could these things rust? I checked the cupboards, many empty tubs, plastic tubs.

"What are these?"
"Oh, those are ice cream"

On the counter there were empty orange juice cartons, about 10 of them. The refrigerator was empty except for a stick of butter and about a dozen chicken carcasses, only the bones left. In the living room there were two plastic chairs, a desk with computer, and a television. The bathroom doorknob was broken and there were shirts hung up on the shower pole drying.

"What are those shirts doing in there, where do you wash them?"
"In the sink"
"Why don't you go to the laundry room?"
"I can't walk"

I had some work cut out for me so I got a 12 pack of beer and watched the superbowl. Dallas v. Pittsburgh. In the morning I scrubbed the rust off the silverware, then went to the salvation army and bought a couch to have delivered. I slept on that, and my dad kept sleeping on the floor and washing his shirts in the sink. He went to work every day and when he came home we would talk about politics. He complained against "the left" and we didn't agree on much. I found a big pile of magazines on the floor, Handgunner, Shooter's Bible, etc.

"Do you have a gun? What's with all these magazines?"
"No, but I'm going to get one. I'm researching the market"
"Why?"
"Home invasions"
"You're not going to get a gun, c'mon, who's going to invade this place anyway? It's hardly a home"
"I'm going to get a gun"

His back really was bad, I had to drive him to the entrance of the aerospace company where he worked and pick him up at the end of the day. He couldn't walk from the parking lot.

"So when are you going to get an appointment with the doctor, you need to get your back fixed, this is ridiculous"
"I have to get the insurance straightened out, those assholes at work don't know what they're doing"
That went on for a month or so but I finally nagged him into getting the appointment. Surgery.

I got him a walker so he could get around the house better. Then things worsened so I had to get him a wheelchair. He liked it. "You know, this thing is pretty comfortable." I threw the gun magazines out and played basketball in the afternoons. Florida was not as warm as I had thought.

We met with the surgeon. He had very blue eyes so I didn't really trust him. You can never really tell what a person with blue eyes is feeling or thinking. It's a cold color and I can't read it. So I figured if he screwed the surgery up I would kill him. It made me feel better. I probably would have done it, back then. I wasn't happy anyway.

The surgery went OK though and my father had about six stitches in the small of his back. We got rid of the wheelchair and the walker and he began to walk around again.

It was time to go. Florida was not for me. Some people get lonely if they are alone too much, but not me. I crave solitude and need it. People talk too much. But I'll have to keep an eye on that so that I don't wind up sleeping on a floor surrounded only by gun magazines and rusted forks fearing the home invasion and getting smaller all the while, shrinking and shrinking, waiting to disappear completely.