THE POTENTIAL POSSIBILITIES

"Now take my hand and hold it tight.
I will not fail you here tonight.
For failing you, I fail myself
And place my soul upon a shelf"
The Book of Counted Sorrows

Part 2
1977 (continued from previous post)
I don't remember the real reason I moved back home. My best friend and I had an Apartment for the last two years. The sign over our front door read in rustic script on a weatherbeaten board "Little Hoss Ranch" .
'Ranch" was right and we entertained nightly.

Every week my mother would call and I was generally so stoned that I could not speak.

I held a good job at the time as 1st Cook for a gourmet Restaurant making the whopping sum of 3.15 an hour. I didn't know it then, but I had yet to grasp any real Culinary Fundamentals.

I did not know that within the year my father would be in a VA Hospital and that these would be the last days that our relationship would be domestic...that this would be the last time to fix his breakfast and have him tell stories about coffee so hot that it had to be "Saucered and Blowed" several times before it was drinkable. A stack of pancakes and a frosty glass of milk goes a long ways towards relaxed conversations and the turning of dusty pages. So does the Psuedo Welsh Rarebit I used to fix that he enjopyed immensly.

More so, so much more so, than the words "You have a Visitor, Jack".

It would be the last chance to have him wax about the Steaks he had eaten in Chicago at Northwestern in the years before his time in North Africa, as he wolfed the ones I had prepared in the backyard. I still think those were the best steaks I have ever cooked.

And I did not realize at the time just how much my mother was relieved to have both her boys at home, or how much help I was in taking care of an early onset Alzheimers patient*. To think that I cried a sorrowful cry the day that I finished moving back home, with the 3 Lisa's that had helped me move saying 'Living at home won't be so bad".

Dad and I , it seems to me now, were equally handicapped.

Dad used to tell me the Doctors were wrong. Dad used to tell me he could "beat this thing". We would be heading out the back door to look at the Alaskan Freight Canoe that we had bought. We were going to cover it with an Epoxy resin Dad knew about. She was was in bad shape, this vessel, and a real concern for my Mom.
Mom would whisper to me in hushed tones "You and he both try to fix things with gum wrappers and soda straws, you will never get that thing afloat!" Looking back I know that she was right, but at the time I thought she was kind of poisoning our well. All we ever really did was look at it and discuss the potential possibilities.

Dad would say 'These Doctors dont know what they are talking about. I can beat this thing. I can see... the nit... on the nut... of a gnat." His is voice would crack with something torn between a rage and a will and a fear.
"Sure you can, Pop... if anyone can , it will be you."
And we both would enjoy a somewhat disingenuous Belly laugh.
His ice blue eyes would dance and look straight into mine for moment. Then he would turn and ask
"Now wheres that doorknob?" He knew the door was there but the knob always eluded him.
"I got it Dad"
Now the laughs came real. With his quick wit, the irony never eluded him.
Laughter always trumps sorrow.

And it reminds me of just how quick and observant you have to be to catch a Night Crawler, much more dceptive a creature tham one would imagine, and the importance of gathering bait. To be continued.....

Another addendum*
You can google Early Onset Alzheimers for the Medicos on it so I will refuse leaving the link. I can put it into a bit of a personal perpective for you... you hears about folks in their 60's and 70's that are Alzheimers victims... my Dad became completely disabled at the ripe old age of 58 and unable to work...I was barely out of High School...and the story you just read was but 2 years later, Dad being 60.

I won't try to tell you that these were the best days of my life, but I will say that there has been much fruit and treasure; still today there remains both of these, unimagined, yet to be fully realized... so many potential possibilities...