Fear Friday

For a variety of reasons, mostly involving neglect, disinterest, and sheer laziness, I do not have TV service at home.

What I do have is a 20-year-old 19-inch TV that I use to watch my DVDs on.

Recently I am thinking that this has got to change.

One of the reasons I can state in two words. Fear Friday.

On many Fridays, I go down to Littleton to spend the afternoon and evening with my stepmother, Amy. We'll do errands and go out to eat, then come home and inevitably watch some TV.

So, these Fridays are my only real TV viewing time for the week. I'm devoted to the rantings on The McLaughlin report. We'll usually watch the local news at 10 pm.

Amy will nod and drift off and fall asleep on one end of the couch as I sit flipping channels on the other. She'll stay dozing there for quite a while before she wakes up just enough to decide to go to bed. She always tells me to stay as long as I like.

I used to leave just shortly after Amy went to bed.

But a few times I stayed and channel-surfed through the dreck of her Utterly Basic Cable, which she got really just so she could continue to receive the local channels. And sometime about a year ago I chanced upon it: Fear Friday.

Of course, as of yet I didn't know what Fear Friday was. Nor did I have any devotion to it. All I knew was that they were showing the original classic Night of the Living Dead, and I couldn't resist watching the last 45 minutes or so of the ur-zombie movie. Then, I noticed, the station followed it with another, highly inferior, zombie flick. I watched just a little bit of that one and hit the road.

But there was something fun about being up in the middle of the night here in the family room at one end of the darkened house while Amy slept at the other end, watching the beloved low-budget film that launched the whole zombie cult. In between the ads I saw AMC's promos for upcoming film series, tied together always with their new slogan "Story Matters Here." And always just before the movie itself was firing up again, the words FEAR FRIDAY jerkily staggering around the screen and finally aligning themselves in lurid black on red. (Or maybe white on red?)

I didn't think anything of it, never crossed my mind, until maybe a couple or three weeks later, when the end of a Friday of errands and dinner with Amy found me once more settling down on the couch to see what a little channel surfing might turn up.

And this time it was both the old and the new versions of The Fly, back-to-back! I got sucked in again, this time just in time to watch the disgusting, unlikely, horrifying and somehow hilarious climax of David Cronenberg's The Fly, with the creature that used to be Jeff Goldblum sliming up his laboratory and Geena Davis, who finally blasts him to pieces with a shotgun. Really a tour-de-force of disturbing imagery, that film! Wow. I either missed or purposely left without seeing the Vincent Price version, which has a few joys of its own.

But Fear Friday had bit me again.

After two or three chance run-ins with the show like this, I began to realize that it was a show. The facts started to coalesce in my brain like so many zombies converging on the big white house where the still-living are holed up.

Fear Friday is a Friday night horror movie festival on AMC. They show two or maybe three horror films in a row, often connected thematically.

Part of the fun of the presentation, for me at least, comes with AMC's plugs for the week's upcoming (non-horror) film series. They throw films together under an umbrella theme, and the little ads feature well-edited film clips of a bunch of disparate movies. The fun lies partly in trying to ldentify all these films from just a shot here and a shot there. And the promos reveal progressively a little more each time. It is a clever promotion. Fun to watch and it keeps you guessing.

So now I knew just what Fear Friday was, and approximately when it comes on. But I wasn't obsessed with it.

Yet.

I didn't yet look forward to the next Friday night's selection, wonder what they might be showing. I didn't yet talk at length to people at work about it. I hadn't yet even really spoken the words "Fear Friday."

But I would. I would.

In recent weeks, some of the joys offered up by AMC on Fear Friday have been:

Poltergeist - Utterly ridiculous fun which could be described in TV Guide as: "Suburban family is menaced by over-the-top self-indulgent state-of-the-art special effects!" But the film's core and its germ, I'm sure, and its worthy, lasting place in American culture, is that it enshrines the now-lost-but-not-forgotten eerie moment when the TV stations go off in the middle of the night, abandoning you to the existential challenge of snow and white noise. The first thing you hear in Poltergeist is the Star-Spangled Banner, signalling, you soon find out, the horrifying end of another broadcast day.

The Amityville Horror - Creepy film from an older era, before special effects took over. I kept seeing parallels between this evil-house-that-caused-previous-owner-to-kill-his-entire-family film and Stanley Kubrick's masterful The Shining. Was Kubrick. . .or possibly Stephen King. . .influenced by this film? The creepiness here revolves mostly around everyday things, like flies and toilets backing up and unsettled dogs. But these items are put together in odd ways, exaggerated, played up. As in The Shining, one child has an evil imaginary friend. And then there's the great performance by Rod Steiger, as a priest who is brought in to bless the house, and whom the house progressively takes apart, blinds, and ruins. Fun film. Terrible ending.

The Shining - We were sitting there on the couch, Amy and I, when I chanced to tune in to the baseball bat scene in this terrific film. What an amazing scene, in how it develops and how long it goes on, and the escalating dialogue as Jack Nicholson threatens the pleading Shelley Duvall across the lobby, eventually backing her up the stairs as she swipes at the air pathetically, ineffectually with the bat! The scene is sustained for unbelievably long! The actors are so well-matched here, Nicholson sarcastic and terrifying and insane, and Duvall's Wendy beaten down and whimpering but fiercely protecting her son. Jack keeps cajoling her, "Give me the bat, Wendy!" and eventually, she does. She gives it to him. Right in the side of the head.

I appreciated that film more than ever viewing it that night. It is so wildly over-the-top, so fiercely hilarious! I cackle with laughter as Nicholson sails off the deep end!

Then there was the great double-billing of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the original Bela Lugosi classic. This was inspired. The Frances Ford Coppola film, so deliciously lush and visually inventive, contains so many self-conscious hat-tips to its 1931 inspiration. Gary Oldman intones lines that we all know from Bela's delivery of them: "I am Dracula. I bid you wel-come!" Playing the two films back-to-back like this really showed how excellent they both are, and what a worthy successor the Coppola film is to the original.

So now Fear Friday's got me.

I might just have to buy a TV.

Off the Cuff

Just off the cuff here.

I am working on a blogpiece of some length touching on events of childhood visits to my grandparents' farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Been working on this piece for some time. The date where it is stored in the Blogger Dashboard astonishes me:
9/30/09. I have been slogging away at this piece, albeit in a sometimes desultory fashion, now for six months and 10 days. Or so.

Wow.

In the mean time, after I started that piece, I have published a couple of others.

And I thought it was high time for another.

As the title suggests, this blog is pure spew. Just me tapping away on my tippy-tappy laptoppy, sitting here at my accustomed perch in a corner at a local Village Inn Pancake House. And, its nature being such, it might end up demonstrating why most of my pieces are more planned out! We'll see.

A blog is supposed to have a bit of spontaneity about it, isn't it? A journal-like quality of frequent postings? That sort of thing?

The Red Wheelbarrow has never been a thing of frequent postings, anyway. And I do feel a little guilty about it!

Well, it is what it is and it will be what it will be.

For the moment, though, I'd like to talk just a little about the vagaries of memory. I wrote "vagaries of memory" out of a kind of lazy impulse. It is a hackneyed phrase, isn't it?

But, looking up "vagary" in my online dictionary I find this definition:

"an unexpected and inexplicable change in a situation or in someone's behavior."

Fantastic! Could not be more apt to my discussion here.

After writing a few paragraphs on the legendary Bucks County farm piece, I felt like running them by my two brothers, Bill and Rog, to see how my brief sketches of a few places and things compared with their memories of them. I sent them each an email with my descriptions and a few questions.

They each responded very quickly, and it launched a short but intense discussion among the three of us about some details of the old farm that we took such pleasure in visiting when we were kids.

Our memories, needless to say, differed. For instance, in talking about a marvelous and ancient machine, The Corn Sheller, out in the barn: I remember it clearly as being painted a dullish red-brown with fading yellow trim, while both brothers have no memory of it being painted at all. We even differed over what it was called. To me there is no question that it was The Corn Sheller, but my elder brother, Bill, who is 6 years older than me and thus should remember better calls it The Corn Shucker.

Hmmmmm. . .

Even more interesting is the way those vagaries have rendered our memories of the physical landscape at the farm. Back behind the main house there were a couple of ancient and fascinating outbuildings. Both were square, thick-walled stone buildings. One had been an old smokehouse, with the other being called The Woodshed.

I recall us being slightly forbidden to go in these buildings, and so we went in them when we could get away with it. The Smokehouse had not been in use for years. It was a dirt-floored, empty square. On hot summer days it was a great refuge from the heat, being naturally cool, but there was really nowhere to sit nor much of anything to do in there. The Woodshed I remember as very dark and somewhat scary and definitely forbidden. The main thing in there was a big stump on the floor with a hatchet's blade buried in it. This darkly suggested a place where chickens had been beheaded, and there was a delicious scariness in it for us.

But before I make the mistake of speaking too much for "us," let me show how that could be a big mistake.

Though we visited our grandparents' farm many times in our childhoods, and surely skulked around and daringly crept inside these two small old buildings lots of times, they show up very differently in our three distinct brotherly memories. Or, more accurately, they don't show up there.

In the ensuing 40 years since we were kids, our mental landscapes of the farm have shifted and altered, blurred here and there, sometimes changed completely. Those outbuildings, The Smokehouse, The Woodshed: they have flickered and fluxed, and in some cases winked out entirely.

Roger, 15 months older than me, does not remember The Woodshed at all. And Bill had this to say:

"But strange - I don't remember anything about any smokehouse, even after reading Jim's description of it's location."

As the three of us continued to compare memories by email, it came back to me once again that memory is not any kind of a documentary, recording function. We are constantly revising and rewriting the scripts of our lives. We cobble together this memory with another, far removed in space or time. We visualize things people have told us and then swear we were present where we could not have been. Even with single objects or events, we all color these in our own ways, according to the mysterious dictates of our own personalities. My memory landscape contains a barn with an old wooden red and yellow painted corn shelling machine. My brothers' show a different device.

Memory is a creative function.

Dolce Far Niente

I thought of Ben Sweet today.

Lovely, irascible, erudite, puckish, Ben Sweet.

Ben--no one I knew called him "Professor Sweet"--was a wonderful portly professor who taught for a time out at what was then called Community College of Denver, Red Rocks Campus. I know little else about his life or his death. He was in theater, I know, but where I knew him from was his classes out at Red Rocks.

He taught several classes on British history, and British Literature, I believe.

One of my proudest achievements in all my academic career was a comment that Ben Sweet made on a poem I had turned in to him. I was consciously mimicking the delicious over-the-top euphony of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I still remember this ancient poem of mine word-for-word. . .but would not, I'm sure, save for Sweet's delicious critique.

You have to understand that Sweet was an exacting critic. He was not mean--anything but--but he wore a flinty, no-nonsense exterior when it came to the subjects he loved. Here the subject was the English language. More than that: Poetry. Here he did not kid around. . .though that flinty mask always held a gaily glinting eye beneath a bushy eyebrow.

I had labored on the poem, working hard to get the sounds just right. It was short and not very deep, but stuffed with sound.

I waited for it to come back from the teacher. Ben Sweet was one whose opinion really mattered.

The single note-book paper sheet came back with Ben's comment at the top. "Almost good," it said.

From this man, those two words meant more to me than any number of facile As on papers from other teachers. It still thrills me, and I think of it often: "Almost good." Wow.

In addition to his British History and Literature classes, Ben taught his own invented course, one that was personally important to him. It was called "Jesus and the Challenge of Being Human."

Sweet's idea of Jesus was very particular and often at odds with popular images, and he spent the first class period making that very clear. His Jesus was muscular, bold, radical, and above all, socialist. Ben Sweet told us in that first class that he embraced socialism to begin with because Jesus was so deeply a commited socialist.

This afternoon I sat in a bar. Since I don't drink, I don't often sit in bars. But this place is right across the street from where I live, and it is a pleasant little place. Suddenly something Ben Sweet once said came back to me, and, thinking about it, slowly the whole amazing man appeared in my imagination.

He said it in that first class period of his Jesus class. It was a quote I so loved that I immediately wrote it down, repeated it often, and have never forgotten it.

Ben was in a fine fury about Jesus and who he really was. He was dissing most popular conceptions. With his feet planted wide, arms gesticulating, he said with rascally hellfire, "He's not just some bleedin' heart, hangin' on the cross, telling you not to have a beer or say damn!"

Sleep peacefully, Ben Sweet.

Two-Headed Monster

Talking to my brother, Roger, on the phone earlier this evening, I had another weirdly humorous reminder of the deep and sometimes strange connection between us.

I say "sometimes," because the two of us have long since come to laughingly take the whole thing for granted, expect it to happen, even, preternatural as its manifestations may be.

You have heard stories about oddly deep connections between twins even when the twins have been physically separated for most of their lives. Well, though we were born 15 months apart, with Roger and I, it's like that, too. Just like that.

To put it scientifically, the power of genetics is manifest in our lives.

First, there are the similarities you expect from brothers. We are both big, fat guys with roundish, chunky, cheerful heads. Our distinctive, buzzing voices sound the same. (This is a quality shared by our third, seemingly mutant, thin and wiry brother, Bill. It has something to do with our northern New Jersey upbringing.) In fact, when Roger and I still lived in the same house, we would occasionally try to fool callers by subtly pitching our very similar voices.

It goes beyond just the sound of our voices, though. It's the way we use those voices, too. We both have a digressive and discursive, detailed way of speaking that can be frustrating to more direct-speaking friends and acquaintances. On any subject that matters, we might start with what we consider important deep background. That is, we take it back to when we were little kids in New Jersey. Or further. Then we illustrate, we progress, we take side trips, backtrack, remember important details we should have put in earlier. We take, in short, the long way around.

That's what I gather, anyway.

So, Roger and I look and sound alike, or very similar. If you swapped my often longish, thick, unruly grey hair and goatee for his self-cut, wispy, one-time blond and pencil-thin Gable mustache, we could take a respectable crack at fooling people.

These kinds of things you might expect from brothers. Even Bill, whom at first glance a stranger might think is from a different family, exhibits some similarities. Some of these grow more and more obvious as the three of us grow older. When I uncovered my now-adult face for the first time in my life by shaving off my beard some years ago, I came to realize that, yes, Bill and I do look alike in some ways.

But then there are the odder manifestations I mentioned earlier.

Roger lives in Germany. He has been there since 1983. We are in almost constant contact by phone and on the internet. We love our instant messenger sessions together.

On the instant messenger it is a common occurrence that we'll both type the same thing at the same time and send it nearly simultaneously. Our wording might be slightly different, but we've both come up with the same comment or question. Often this seems like a new or unique statement to each of us, a new subject or drastic veer away from what we were just talking about. . .until we read that that other brother came up with it, too. Our brains followed very similar paths from whatever we last talked about to arrive at this same place. It has happened like that so many times that we hardly note it anymore.

Then there are the thoughts and even activities that we seem to be doing "independently together."

So, you got your car inspected on the same day I did?
You are also reading about the Civil War?
I had no idea that you, too, were a fan of the Pretenders.

When the weight of these "coincidences" becomes sometimes hilariously annoying, we might seek to assert our own individuality. And of course, Roger and I are different in many ways. Roger is a genius with his hands, with planning projects and following through with them. He is a brilliant maker. I am a ham-fisted dunderhead in this department. Roger is very much more talented musically than I am. He is adept at picking up instruments and noodling around with them, at figuring out songs. I have never been very musical. I try, but it is a struggle for me. Roger might say that I am better with words, but I'm convinced it is just a matter of where we put our attention.

But inevitably, the similarities return:

We are both birders, though Roger, as in most things, is far more diligent and serious about it than I am. We both have favorite birdwatching spots outside of the cities we live in. Both places are lakes. And one of the typical activities for each of us involves making our way to a wooden observation structure to get a better view of waterfowl on the lake. We didn't plan it this way.

To add another layer, in the "tape days"--the years when we frequently exchanged cassette tape letters--we'd sometimes find ourselves listening to a tape of the other brother's birding expedition while we ourselves were driving out to our own lake.

These types of correspondences, though amusing, are understandable considering our shared interests and basic outlooks on life.

The phenomenon is at its most amazing when it has nothing to do with opinions or values, but comes, rather, as a strange echoing of trivial events in our quotidian lives. Some silly thing that happened to me, or that I do in a certain way, I find that Roger experienced also or does the same way. The very unimportance of these events is what makes their correspondence startling, and, to us, usually hilarious.

Why would it turn out that we shave using not only the same type of razor, but the same shaving pattern? On our tapes some years ago, we kicked around the subject of odd things we do that we have never told anyone. That is how we found out that we are both sometime "step-counters": we habitually count our steps when walking from place to place. We both bought cars with sunroofs. We had never talked about sunroofs.

There is a paradox here, though: the more unimportant the action or event we share, not only the more amazing the coincidence, but the more difficult it is to remember! Who remembers these littlest of activities, sometimes as small as gestures or odd, inconsequential thoughts? So, even when Roger and I do weirdly share one, it tends to slip away quietly and disappear. They are the lint of the mind. They blow away in the merest puff.

I've been struggling with this, in fact, in working on this piece, and I have to apologize. I have been trying for quite some time, with Roger's help, to remember some of the more amazing examples of this correspondence between us. And what I have come up with arrives like lukewarm drizzle or small beer. Not that impressive, somehow.

But that doesn't mean the phenomenon is not real. It is very real. Roger and I feel it deeply and experience these funny echoes often. It feels, sometimes, like we are two parts of the same being, living different aspects of one life. It feels like we are a chunky, pleasant-headed colossus, one foot planted firmly in Berlin, one in Denver, spanning the Atlantic!

So, earlier this evening we were once again on the instant messenger, typing away about this and that and nothing in particular. Near the end of our conversation I was talking about my recent efforts to pick out the guitar introduction to "Stairway to Heaven" on my ukulele. I had only gotten as far as the first line or two (the first line repeats as the second), but was delighted how the iconic, oh-so-familiar opening notes of the song came out so easily on the uke. And I wanted to share it with Roger.

In a typical exchange of this two-headed, intercontinental monster:

Jim: Grab your uke and I'll talk you through it.

Roger: Grabbed already!

So we picked through the first 5 notes of the song, Roger getting it much quicker than I did, of course. Then came time for us to sign off the computer, as Roger needed to go to bed.

But he wanted to phone me first to explain something, which involved a little story of when he first left the country to go vagabonding in Europe. He wanted to actually hear my progress on the "Stairway to Heaven" intro, as well.

Well, this involved balancing my cell phone on a pile of books, papers, and so forth, so that it was close to the sound hole of the uke. I plucked a few strings to see if Roger could hear it.

And here came the occurrence that amazed me.

Roger had his uke in hand as well. He was plucking a few strings. And our instruments were in tune. Perfectly.

This would easily be explained if we both had tuned our ukuleles properly, to a pitch pipe or some other source. But we hadn't.

Or, at least I hadn't. Last time I tuned the instrument, I just tuned the strings to each other, and to a pitch I found pleasing. After failing to find my 40-year-old pitch pipe, I said to myself that the key doesn't matter. I'll just make sure the strings are tuned to each other, and forget about the actual key overall. After all, I was not playing it with anybody.

And it turned out that Roger's uke was tuned haphazardly, as well, a tone or two flat of the proper tuning.

I do not have perfect pitch or absolute pitch, or whatever. I don't even know the difference between the two.

But, like so many small occurrences in our mysteriously shared lives, like our lives themselves, our instruments were in tune.

Perfectly.

Denver's Last Drive-In

One recent Monday night, Jon, Donna, and I went to Denver's last remaining drive-in movie theater.

Since the unstoppable juggernaut of soulless urban real estate deals rolled across the northwest corner of Hampden and Santa Fe and razed our beautiful, always-packed Cinderella Twin Drive-In after the 2007 season, Denver has been left with only one drive-in.

It took a year of mourning before Jon, Donna, and I could bring ourselves to make the pilgrimage to this other, last, unknown location. The only game in town.

Let me report that the 88 Drive-In is alive and sprockets clicking, its projector beam a literal beacon to the faithful in the urban dark of Commerce City, northeast of Denver.

Indeed, the darkness of the location is one of the big pluses of the 88 Drive-In. Unlike the old Cinderella Twin, this drive-in is situated in a little-traveled, dark corner of the metro area. Though 88th Avenue does lie right behind the screen, the lights of cars and trucks on the street do nothing to mar the drive-in experience. The 88's screen is mounted relatively high, and the car lights don't interfere at all. In fact, since the screen is surrounded with a pleasant blackness, the brightly-projected film image looks vibrant and clear, not bathed in murky grey, as was the case at the light-saturated Cinderella's Englewood location.

We found this drive-in relatively well-attended for a Monday night. I mean, who goes to the drive-in on a Monday night? Apparently enough people know about this one to give it that nice, communal drive-in feel.

I bet it is packed on weekends!

Setting foot in the no-frills snackbar part of the building that houses the projector was a kind of delightful nostalgia kick for me. It was just the perfect mixture of painted cinderblock walls, flourescent tube lighting, waist-high barrier walls topped with painted-pipe handrails, and gleaming chrome cafeteria-style serving fixtures. A kind of heaven.

The service at both the snack bar and the ticket booth was cheery and efficient. The projection of the film was crisp, clear, and bright, and even included the obligatory sentimental annoying announcement of the snack bar's closing cutting in over the second feature's soundtrack!

If you go, make sure your vehicle has a good, working FM radio to receive the movie sound. Jon and Donna's car had a radio problem at first and my heart sank, thinking they were going to miss the drive-in experience! But they moved to a different location and all was well. Loud and clear!

For some reason, I never went to the drive-in when I was a kid. My eldest brother, Bill, definitely remembers going, but maybe by the time I came along the thrill (for my parents!) was gone. I don't know. But I always feel this as a painful gap in my childhood experience. Other people talk about being bundled up as kids with blankets and food and heading for the drive-in. I just have to say, hunh, must have been fun.

So, people. I'm telling you. Bundle up those kids and head out there to Commerce City for a wonderful drive-in experience! Or go yourselves! Find some chintzy movie double-feature that might be painful to see in the theater, but which will be perfect to see in the drive-in, and go!

Go! Just go!!

"His block is knocked off??!"

A real favorite commercial from when I was a kid. Unless there is an alternate version, I had misremembered the line as "He knocked his block off!" which is much better, actually, than the strange passive construction used here. Gotta love these kids, though. Their enthusiasm really sells what looks like a pretty limited toy. How long could you play with this before growing bored??

What My Father Said

In December of 2000, my father was in the hospital. He was there for nearly the entire month, accompanied the whole time by his devoted second wife, Amy. I visited nearly every day after work.

Those were to be some of the last weeks of his life.

One afternoon, during this time, my dad said something I will never forget. It was a broken-brained formulation of a short-circuited head, and it was absolutely brilliant.

My dad was living with a couple of kinds of cancer. He had, in fact, been diagnosed with prostate cancer over ten years earlier, so, according to the statistics, he had beat that disease. But, after the bypass surgery he'd managed to avoid for 30 years, with his immune system compromised, things began to pop up. A small mark on his leg, next to the scar where the cardiac surgeons removed the vein, turned out to be melanoma.

What really sent him to the hospital there near the end, though, was a cerebral hemorrhage. He had been driving with Amy one day, when, suddenly as he turned left at an intersection, he complained of being disoriented.

The disorientation continued at home, and eventually he was taken to the hospital.

It took some time to determine the cause of his problem. There were many things going wrong with him at this time. He was actively taking a regimen of chemotherapy for the cancer. And it was a question, should he continue the chemo, now that he was in the hospital for something quite else?

I remember standing by his bed as his oncologist asked this very question. I remember being amazed when Dad confidently and cheerily insisted that the chemo should continue.

At this time, and for weeks, his affect was disarmingly sunny, enthusiastic, attentive, and quite normal. His blue eyes were bright and sharply focused. If anything, he was happier than normal.

He had the TV on in his room most of the times I visited. He loved watching Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And we all viewed with disquiet and jokes and growing alarm the election news that grew stranger and more tangled each day.

For this was December of 2000, and the presidential election of over a month before was still up for grabs. The two sides faced off across an unbridgeable constitutional canyon. New nomenclature clogged the airwaves, tutoring us in the differences between hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads.

Dad had been a lifelong Republican, but the events of recent years had sometimes severely tested his political faith. He had a hard, pragmatic side much stronger than any mere political affiliation and, in the right circumstances, he'd look toward Washington and label the entire crew there a pack of scoundrels.

I visited him every day, if I could, at least for a short time. Amy, bless her heart forever, was essentially living at the hospital, so that eventually the staff offered her a bed of her own to sleep in so she would not have to crash out every night on the room's recliner.

And for a while it was hard to tell that there was anything really wrong with my father. As I said, he seemed bright and chipper, following conversation and his TV game shows with alertness and seemingly normal humor. And his eye seemed just as jaundiced and cynical as ever when the interminable election news wrangled on and on.

I first discovered that things were not as they should be on one visit when Dad wanted to talk about some household business. As long as I was talking to him, as I said, he seemed at ease and attentive. It was when he had to speak to me that he had problems. Big problems. The concepts were there, but he could not find the words. He would stop in mid-sentence. He'd twist his hands in the air in a frustrated search. He'd hold his head, as if the effort hurt him. If Amy or I prompted him with words ("Treasury bills", "file folders", "interest,") his eyes would light up and he would leap on it, his whole being saying "yes, that's it!" But when he tried to formulate these concepts into words himself, it was a big struggle. There was something terribly wrong.

And he knew there was something terribly wrong, and would express it by saying something like "Oh, I am in big trouble now!" He knew his brain was having problems when it came to finding words, and he was understandably scared.

That his ability to turn ideas and pictures in his head into words was badly impaired became more and more obvious now with each visit. It was especially true in the case of more abstract notions. But even concrete nouns, like the Treasury Bills he was desperate to tell us about, were elusive. As soon as Amy or I supplied the word for him, he would say "Yeah!" with a rising inflection that carried a heartbreaking combination of embarassment and bemused anger at himself: "well of course! I know that. Isn't that obvious!"

The more I visited, day after day, the more I saw that my father's brain was deeply affected by what the doctors by this time labeled a cerebral hemorrhage. His problem with words began to seem simple and easily definable compared to other, stranger manifestations.

For instance, I began to think that Dad's brain was often carrying two concepts together at once in a way that the rest of us would find either an effort of will or a scary intrusion. I thought about those times that our brains are slipping into sleep or rising from sleep to full daytime consciousness that psychologists call hypnagogia or threshold consciousness.

We all have experienced--and might even experience nightly--these strange states of mind. For me, they often overlay or blend two types of thought: first, a mechanical operation, like enumerating, or sorting by colors, or making a list, or the like. But at the same time, the colored beads I am sliding along wires, say, are also people's feelings, or worries about tasks left undone, or maybe things I have to do in a certain order before getting out of bed. I often feel frustrated, sliding those beads around, knowing I can never really get them in the right order.

It began to seem, or I began to imagine, that my father's head as he lay there in his hospital bed, was locked in such a state of double-mindedness. Things he said sometimes pointed toward this. He would connect an abstract concept with a concrete one in an alarming shift.

It was during this time when he came out with a statement that still amazes me and fills me with a strange joy.

I had arrived for my daily visit just on the tail end of Dad's meal time. He still had dessert to come, and wanted to see if he could share some with me. Both Amy and he had ordered pieces of pie, and they quickly decided to offer me a piece, instead. I would get Amy's slice.

"Have a piece of apple pie!" said Dad. The pie had not arrived yet. Amy said it was cherry, not apple.

Up in the corner of the room, the TV news was a tangle of move and counter-move in the election crisis. Recounts proposed and challenged, chads flying every which way, lawyers and politicos squaring off.

Dad was gazing at it and shaking his head.

"Those so-n-sos!" he exclaimed.

An orderly arrived with two pieces of cherry pie in styrofoam bowls.

"What. . .chicanery!" Dad continued. Such an interesting word came out of his mouth. It wasn't one I would think of. I looked closely at him.

Dad made a fuss of offering me some "apple pie," handing me one of the bowls as he held the other. He kept looking back up at the TV while fussing with the pie.

"Apple pie!. . .apple pie!" he urged, pushing it at me.

"Chicanery?" I asked, still delighted with the word.

"Yeah!" said my father, gesturing up at the TV with his fork, "Apple pie chicanery!" And laughed.

I laughed too.

I looked at him with wonder, and laughed! He had come out with this amazing statement, this piece of crack-brained poetry, and it delighted me. But had he known what he had said, really?

As if reading my mind, he repeated, "Yeah! Apple Pie Chicanery!"

It was the last, best thing I heard my father say.