My Father's Footprints Read Online Free PDF Page A

trick of age and disease has been to make him
     pretty much like everybody else.
    “Can you get me out of here?” he asks.
    “No. It doesn’t make sense for you to be anywhere else.”
    He tells me he has been assured I can get him out of there. He also tells me I am, to the best of his knowledge, his father.
    My wife succumbs to the Venusian croup-flu. I am now officially the plate-and-stick guy.
    Everybody is sick. On a Saturday night I’m leaving alone, to go see
Washington Square,
mainly because I love Jennifer Jason Leigh and never miss her movies.
    I’m heading out the door to watch two hours of HenryJames making sure nobody gets anything they really want. Joey asks if I’m coming straight home.
    “Where else would I go?” I ask.
    “Go out. Get drunk,” he suggests.
    “And then what?”
    “Buy a gun,” he adds helpfully.
    “Sounds like a great Saturday night. I’m on my way.”

    “Who wrote the plays
Macbeth
and
Hamlet
?”
    My father thinks a bit. He is sitting in his wheelchair at the nursing home, a place I am starting to like, with its goofy
     faux-everything, cheery retro-fifties decor. We are in the Bamboo Room, my favorite of the several public spaces, with its
     poseur Asian motif but no actual bamboo that I can see.
    “I don’t know,” he finally admits. I don’t think the whole Francis Bacon controversy is what’s slowing him down here.
    Maybe multiple choice would be better.
    “Who wrote
The Glass Menagerie
? Was it
    a. William Shakespeare
    b. Tennessee Williams
    c. Arthur Miller?”
    “
The Glass Menagerie
would be Tennessee Williams,” he says very slowly.
    I am pleased, and begin again.
    “A closed system will nonetheless gradually lose energy. I am describing entropy, which is the second law of
    a. Thermodynamics
    b. Quantum mechanics
    c. Motion.”
    “That would be motion.”
    I am sad. He was the one who taught me about the second law of thermodynamics.
    “Do you want to keep doing this? I mean, are you enjoying it?”
    “Yes,” he says.
    “Which of the following Revolutionary War generals tried to betray West Point to the British?
    a. Israel Putnam
    b. Benedict Arnold
    c. Horatio Gates?”
    A pause.
    And then, from somewhere behind me:
    “Benedict Arnold!”
    Another guy in a wheelchair. He wants to play, too. So we let him. He’s pretty clueless about the math stuff.
    We move into one of the other public rooms. My mother shows up.
    “Who danced with Ginger Rogers?” I ask.
    “That guy,” my dad says.
    “I know ‘that guy.’ What is his name?” I sing a few bars of “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”
    Now a whole bunch of people in wheelchairs are beaming at me. They like this game. “That guy!” I could get used to this. Magister
     Ludi of the demented.
    I sing some more. Everybody beams. Everybody is happy. How can we not be? There may be trouble ahead, but how can we not be
     happy while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance? Life, in this frozen moment, is paralyzed with goodness.

    “Who wrote
David Copperfield
?”
    “David Copperfield.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean that David Copperfield wrote
David Copperfield.
”
    “That is incorrect. I’ll give you three choices.
    a. Victor Hugo.
    b. Charles Dickens
    c. James Polk.”
    “Why don’t we make it Charles Polk?”
    “Why don’t we?”

    My father has a fever.

    I start getting calls in the afternoon during my daily radio show. He’s bad, he’s worse. Should I come now? Not yet, but maybe
     soon.
    Suddenly, the producer gets on the studio monitor and says, “They think you should come now.”
    I rip the headphones off my head, run to the garage, kick the tires, and light the fires. I’m there in minutes. And he’s slipping.
    If you’ve read this, you know I’m involved. You know I’ve been a good son, pushing the wheelchair, taking care. But I suddenly
     realize I never said the basic, rock-bottom stuff. My mom leaves the room for a few minutes and I hunch forward