In Barcelona, the massive gothic Sagrada Família sprouts
its native-species gargoyles—lizards, etc.—according to Gaudí’s
plans, an astounding city of stalagmites growing “from nature,”
as he said, even though he died in 1926, twelve years into it, leaving
a three-dimensional miniature to work from, all based on
the golden ratio: arches like trees, columns like plants, windows
like marine diatoms. Meanwhile, my father has found that if
he sets the microwave for 1:29, the rotation will stop with
the cup handle facing out so that it can be most easily removed.
Occasionally it takes 1:33, depending on the cup. He has calculated this
carefully over a period of time, a timeless truth. He’s ninety-two
and has nothing but time, wandering around his nice clean retirement
cottage without his tools, his bicycle, his boats. Furthermore,
he’s managed to remove the point of a ballpoint pen cartridge
and tape it to another cartridge so that he can blow the ink from one
to the other when the point of one is stopped up. No waste there.
He’s using up his days organically. I wish I could go back
to Gaudí here, but my father’s too compelling. How much longer
will I have him to show me what to do and not to do? His legs
are getting weak although they retain the residuals of good genes
and a life of motion. He wouldn’t call it exercise. He’s found an exact
combination of kerosene and oil that keeps his Windsor mantel clock
running and on time for about a week, after which the kerosene
dries up and the clock slows down again, not that it matters any more
or less than any other human endeavor, not that anything much
matters to my father anymore, which I notice is a frequent
condition of extreme age and makes me wonder if it isn’t perfectly
natural to back out of life slowly, reducing our interest to the diatomic,
the minute minute. Even his sweetie isn’t much to him,
demented as she is, but they sit every evening at his place, TV blaring,
and he puts his hand in hers. They don’t seem to be thinking
of anything, not even the show, just waiting like Vladimir
and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. My father makes her lukewarm tea
the way she likes it and nods and says what’s necessary to prove
he’s there as she retells the ancient past again. On the phone
he tells me he’d rather be dead if it wouldn’t hurt, or hurt
anybody. In the play, Godot doesn’t arrive and the hanging-rope breaks,
and Estragon’s trousers fall down, and they do it all over again
the next day. It’s an important play. It shows us being us, although
it’s not much fun. Beckett is an important playwright. We had to read him
in school. It was all true, but we were too young to care.
If we were born astride the grave, we were going to swing across
on a Tarzan-rope yelling and beating our chests. We were going to
build cathedrals and other stuff. Some of us did, some didn’t.
This part is almost over for my father. When my Nana lived in Colorado,
where they moved her when Granddaddy died, she made a rooster
out of seeds in the home’s craft class. How stupid to end
your life gluing seeds to a board, I thought, but my mother hung it
on the wall where it stayed long after my mother’s own death,
until my father sold the house. When we threw it
in the dumpster, it felt, cruelly, as if now I could start over, really.