Conversation with my father, Paul, has become a different kind of communication. I first noticed the cognitive decline as he was retiring twelve years ago. These days, most of the time when he speaks (and he still speaks a lot) it’s just word salad. He forgets contexts, tasks, nouns, the time of day. At this point, the only thing he can be relied on to recognize is the people in the room, though even that is slipping. But as his connection to our reality thins, I’ve been deliberately attentive to his emotional journey, and to subjects that rise up for him. One eye is always on the lookout for the glimmer of a nugget among the river stones. The many, many river stones.
Sometime in the 1990s, he took me up for a flight in his glider plane, at a club somewhere north of Guelph. It had been a long day at the grass airfield, and we were keen to get home for supper. The first road after turning out of the driveway was a narrow gravel one, with a long downward slope ahead of us, and steep banks on either side. There was excellent visibility and no traffic, so accelerating to a faster speed than he should have was too easy. By the time the road levelled out, we were probably doing over 90 km/h – not an issue, unless one has to change speed or direction.
A bird sitting in the middle of the road came into view. As we approached, it took off and flew to one side, causing Paul to turn slightly the other way. But then, for no apparent reason, the bird changed direction and flew in the opposite direction. He overcorrected in response, and the car began fishtailing. Thankfully we were both wearing our seatbelts, as we always did. We were sliding all over the road in every direction, but we were going backwards as we started to slow down, getting dangerously close to the bank on my side of the road. We did not stop soon enough to prevent the car from rolling. Whether time only seemed to slow down for me, or whether the car actually rolled onto my side quite gracefully, I don’t perfectly recall, but what happened in that interval I remember incredibly vividly.
Now, there are a few things Paul is not known for, and one of those things would be physical gracefulness. Being a hobby glider pilot involves a lot of physical labour: assembling & disassembling planes each day, hauling them on & off the airstrip. He’s by no means clumsy, but physical tasks are often attacked with vigour, and bodily interactions could be brusque. However, as soon as the driver’s side wheels left the road, he reached out with his right hand and clasped the top of my head so gently I barely felt it, his fingers reaching far enough to the right side to prevent it from slamming into the passenger window. He didn’t hit my head while reaching to grasp it, nor did he push down, nor did he pull toward himself. Like he was shielding a Fabergé egg, he simply held my head perfectly in place as the world turned sideways.
It must have indeed all happened somewhat slowly, because we came to a rest with the car balanced on its side, with my door flat against the ground. At the time I thought, “I’m fine! You didn’t need to hold my head,” though as a twenty-something year-old man who often bristled at overbearingness, it may have been more colourful than that.
The first words I actually uttered were: “That was a very bad bird.”
I don’t actually remember getting out of the car, but I think I had the idea to roll down the driver door window and climb out that way. In fact I remember nothing about what happened next, or how we got home.
Over the years it wasn’t a particularly oft-repeated story in the family lore – who wants to remember totalling a car? It has simply remained there in the background of my ROM, a show of a father’s instinctual protective embrace.
It’s now been well over five years since Paul has flown a glider plane. He doesn’t miss it because he doesn’t really remember it. Most of the time these days he just sits in his den and stares. He needs frequent breaks from company, even with family. Yesterday Dennis and I were visiting for the afternoon, and a few times he retired to the den to sit and stare.
There were a few things my parents needed help with. One of the items on the list was to find a power cord for the portable DVD player. It had gotten lost, probably because for reasons unknown, Paul decided to remove it from the player and pack it away somewhere. A lot of things go missing from that house these days. So I went from room to room, looking in drawers and checking outlets.
When I got to the den to look around, he was happy to see me. “Just looking for the power cord,” I explained. I crouched under his desk to check the power supply and numerous wall warts plugged into it, untangling cords and checking the voltages on the transformers for a match. “Just watch your head,” he warned. He reached down to place his hand between me and the desk drawer. “As long as you protect your head, that’s the important thing.”
That’s when the sparkle caught my eye.
A memory, but with a different quality to it. Not mine, not from my brain. Something long ago. A more primitive time, technologically. Different faces. Different clothing. No wall warts. Paul, again a father, and I, again his son. And a horrible, awful incident. Something happened to his boy’s head. Life-ending for the boy. Worse for the father. He hadn’t been there to protect him. Trauma. Devastation. The world drained of meaning. Gut-wrenching guilt and a sentence of grief surely worse than anything hell could offer.
I dismissed it, and emerged from under the desk, sans power cord. “Not here either,” I said.
A few other words were exchanged, the content of which I don’t remember. But there was a pause, which I filled with a couple blinks, and knew right then that he'd just recalled the same event that I did. And for a moment, I felt what he was feeling: this miracle before him, his fifty-year-old son, hale and whole, and a gratitude that filled his own heart.
“I love you, son,” he said, with what is for him, these days, an unusual presence of mind.
“I love you too, Dad.”
No names. Just that elemental connection, once lost forever, now restored. And I thought about that time in the car on the road with the bird: a re-imagined moment of peril, only this time he got to cradle the head of his beloved son and protect it and keep him free of harm, just as so long ago he’d wished he could have done.