When people ask me where I’m from, my answer often varies, depending on what I see in the questioner. For instance, I’ll always tell the guy with a certain accent (like the cashier at Trader Joe’s yesterday) that I’m from New York. He was jazzed, he’s from Flatbush. To younger people, all Millenials I suppose, I reply that I am from Seattle. If I hear anything about the state of Florida to somebody I have just met (and sometimes I will lightly quiz the curious), I will proudly state my hometown as Miami, Miami Beach, to be precise. It all sounds a little bull-shitty, I know, or like a fantasy spawned by an ultra-provincial person; but I here aver and attest, it is but guileless. I am from all of these places, for every place I’ve ever lived I’ve taken as my home while there. I mean, really, wouldn’t it be miserable to be any other way? It sure is miserable, I know this from experience and was reminded of it last month when I returned to my real hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I haven’t lived there since 1979, and over the years I’ve found sometimes creative excuses to not go back; even though my own father lives and has always lived there, T-Town, he sometimes called it. I’ve managed trips back in 1988, 2005, 2011 and this last time, last month. Of course I visited my dad every time, though he has been (especially now, but more on that later) inscrutable, hard to know, nearly impossible to feel warmth towards (I’ve tried to keep in mind he may have held me in the same regards). I always remember his eyes, a little askance, sometimes with an eyebrow slightly arched, critically looking towards or away from the other people in a room. I’ve remembered this so well because I’ve seen how over the years I seemed to adopt that same criticality, and not just because dad and I look so nearly alike. No it’s not the looks, nor intentional imitation (because I truly can say I hardly know the man), but that we share strange similar traits of movement and posture, physical, an unconscious body english. It makes me think of the stories I’ve read of twins who’ve lived apart but seem to share so much that is uncanny.
So this year I returned, though I tried (admittedly not too hard) to excuse my way out. It was tough to squirm out of, for my family and I were already traveling to Oklahoma City to see my wife’s relatives. It’s only a 110 mile drive further from the 9 hundred something from Atlanta. What could possibly be my excuse this time? My stepmother had died the previous year and I didn’t go back then. There seemed to be little point, I’ve never liked her family and my dad was too out of it to know either way. “Out of it,” I guess that’s a light way to put it, my dad has been mentally slipping for years in fact, and these days is about half the way traveled on the Escher-like winding road of Alzheimer’s and heading rapidly towards what you might call the ultimate inscrutibilty.
Outwardly, I acted like a visit wouldn’t be too bad. Since I didn’t know him too well, maybe his possible non-recognition of his only son wouldn’t sting too much. And I could finally abandon my “should I or shouldn’t I’ uncertainty over whether to make an attempt to warm up to him, to finally find some latent father-son reverie. If my decades long avoidance game with him was in reality a two way street, as I’ve long suspected, then he had come up with the check-mate excuse of all time. Game over.
Also, my sister was going with me to act as a buffer if things got emotional or just weird and embarrassing. So…. I went, I guess I didn’t want to have “that regret,” the ultimate regret of not seeing someone before they die, our mutual alienation notwithstanding. On a chilly morning I hit the road from Norman with my baby in the back seat, charmingly being a baby, and my wife comforting and loving him, and then me with my own thoughts bouncing around in the UFC Octagon that is my head.
Five years ago my dad and his wife visited us in Georgia. Even then he was pretty forgetful, chiding himself when he couldn’t remember something he thought was right there a minute before. He’d brought along a strange ephemera of dad memorabilia to parcel out to my two sisters and I. Most of this stuff was old coins and paper currency and a possibly-leather belt with “Bob” cowboy-etched into it, which he gave to me. He did this because he believed his own end was nigh and he wanted us to remember him. It was as if even he knew that nobody had too much else to go on; none of us had resided in the same house with him longer than a few years of our lives. Thus, memories were a little sparse. Something none of us even suspected was that his completely healthy wife (2013 version) would die before him, though when she did he sadly lacked the mental faculties to properly mourn her and was not even allowed to go to her funeral by her suddenly image-conscious family.
The visit was uncomfortable but kind of nice. He seemed warmer. I thought later that maybe he’d said the same thing about me to his wife on their way home. I even kind of missed him after they left. In retrospect, it was a family reunion, the last of that type that we could ever have. Since then I’d spoken to him on the phone no more than a total of ten times, the occassions being more spread out as he got more out of it. The last call I had with him was last year, and for most of it he thought I was his brother William, who had died in 1956.
I thought of all this on the road with my family those 110 miles to Tulsa. Would he know me at all after that weird phone call last year? Would he get crazy or violent? I’ve always harbored a fear of what I labelled “crazy people” but I believe now it was simply a strong discomfort with off-the-hinges unpredictable behavior. Outside it was getting overcast, a low gray ceiling that I used to experience in a much happier way back in Seattle. Context can be a real bitch, I’ve learned.
By the time we pulled into Tulsa all colors had become muted tones of grey. It was threatening rain. We passed the refinery on the river and I watched as it farted the occasional cloud of whatever it farts. Even the old buildings of downtown looked pallid. I spied Yamasaki’s BOK Tower and could only think of 9/11. We met up with my buffer-sister right outside the assisted living facility where my dad now lives. It was called something with “pines” in it, as is de rigueur for such places. I was relieved to take a little extra time with my wife getting the baby in his stroller. Seeing what was ahead, she turned from comforting him to comforting me. My sister, as always, was perky and positive; she led us all in through the front door, promising it wouldn’t be too bad.
They brought him out of his room for us. Tall and unstooped at 82 years, and even now with a full head of silver-grey hair, he looked at us questioningly. I didn’t notice any difference at that moment because he used to always look at me like that, kind of flinty-eyed, maybe a little suspicious. But then again, maybe he had said something like that about me to his wife years ago. My sister introduced him to my wife, our little baby (“Your only grandson!”) and finally to me. He looked at me and then quickly back to my sister. I could tell he didn’t know me and more importantly I realized that he kind of knew he should have but had decided to move on. I’ll wager that this is a coping mechanism used by many Alzheimers patients, to keep the infringement of sadness away. It began to answer one of my questions, “Does he know that he doesn’t know?” The answer brought me a little lower into melancholy. My dad then turned his attention to my son, he held his little hand with his slightly quivering one. They smiled at each other, my dad’s smile something like delight. They liked each other, but everybody likes babies. My dad then said, “Can you get me out of here? I want to go home.” According to my sister he’s uttered some variation of this many times over the last few months but the “want to go home” part has apparently gotten much weaker in intensity as he has seemed to realize he’s never getting out of there. Another of my questions answered. Melancholy.
Our only plan, ad hoc as it was, was to take dad out for lunch or ice cream, to spring him from his piney prison. Because I hadn’t been to Tulsa in so long, I suggested Coney-I-Lander, Tulsa’s proud purveyor of my favorite chili dogs ever. We drove around until we found one on 71st street and Peoria, or somewhere like that. I wasn’t sure, I followed my maps app, there were no landmarks outside; it looked just like any big-box big city suburb, except in Tulsa we were right in the middle of it. I may not have remembered the place too well but it didn’t matter, it had been torn down and rebuilt in the holy image of Lowe’s Hardware, Panda Express, and QT gas stations. Even the hot dog joint was new, or newish. I remembered the one downtown with the old neon sign, the chalkboard with the “word-scramble” in front of which just about everybody paused (in Coney’s cafeteria style line) to try to figure out. This place was like any, I blankly thought that it reminded me of Mike’s Chicago Style in Atlanta.
We sat down and ate, I was temporarily enthused because I’ve always loved these things, I ordered 3 Coneys. Context being the bitch that it is, however, I didn’t really enjoy them, they tasted off. Not as good as they used to be. I couldn’t tell if dad remembered the hot dogs he’d eaten probably 500 times over a more than 50 year span. He seemed to like them well enough, for he still has a hearty appetite. I focused on the baby and tried to avoid too many interactions with him, my sister asked him a couple of questions, seeing if he remembered different things. He agreed with a couple of her challenges, I suspect just to make her feel better. He then started laughing and told a disjointed story about meeting up with a coworker for a tryst later, and then about a couple of drunk sailors in a hallway somewhere, passed out. I kind of wanted to hear this, but it didn’t make any sense. He never offered up fun stories like this back when he used to be “present and accounted for.” I noticed at the restaurant he still sat with the same posture I do, or maybe put that in reverse – it was still the same.
After a couple more stops we headed back to his rest home. One of the stops was a real surprise because he perfectly navigated his way back on the highway the dozen or so miles back to his old house in Sand Springs. With my sister driving that car he beat my app powered effort in my car by almost ten minutes. But we got to the old hood and it was bleak, and like a participant in a funeral procession I did a little driveby of the old house and my melancholy steepened. My sister texted me and told me dad was crying when he saw it all, I still don’t know if it was because of what he could remember or what he couldn’t.
There was one last thing I had to do before we could decamp back to my wife’s happy family back in OKC. My sister led me into dad’s room. It was tiny and in it was everything he had left in the world. There were just two beds and some shelves and a dresser. Dad had a roommate but he had died in his sleep a few weeks prior, dad took his hat that he had obviously always coveted. Dad then turned to me, he leaned in and smiled, “You know, I don’t know who you are until you start talking. You’re Billy, you’ve always had the same voice. Then you talk again and I know you again.” We were both oddly amused by the phenomena, having both learned something weird about his disease. It was our only “moment.” I was grateful to hear him say it. But still I begged off, I knew we had to start our two hour drive back. All parting greetings were warm, mine was uncomfortable. I just kind of needed to go, aware that I had no idea if I’d ever see him again, or should. Except for the contents of his skull, he is a very healthy old man, he could go on like this for years.
I thought about this as my wife held my hand in the car. The lowering sky now seemed to be right above my head, more sadness. We passed the shallow Arkansas River, it looked incapable of holding a toy boat at that level. I looked at the buildings, the refinery, then finally the relief of open road. With no family left in Tulsa (we used to have generational branches), I felt like I was being rejected, expelled, and frankly the feeling was mutual. Soon there was nothing but farmland and rusting oil pumps. At some point I said to my wife, “Did I just see a preview of my own future there?” I was thinking of mine and my father’s mirroring body english. Maybe it would extend somehow. They say it does. Later on I said, “There’s nothing here for me in Tulsa now, it’s all dead.” And with that dramatic statement I knew I had divorced, or at least estranged myself from my hometown.
It was good to see my wife coming with me, that sounds weird, I know, but I was just grateful to have her, my new family and our gurgling baby behind us. Though still sad I turned my mind to her brother up ahead another 50 miles and his kids, his wife, my own wife’s mother all waiting for us. Happy moments, togetherness, reinvention and growth. The sky stayed grey all the way to Oklahoma City but it looked diferent to me; the context had changed yet again. Maybe the locus of my Oklahoma hometown had moved, but only by about 110 miles.
