It’s Mothers Day, and as is the case on every holiday gathering at my parents’ house, the kitchen is a chaotic symphony of activity. I’m making Parmesan chicken for my mother – the idea being that she wouldn’t have to cook, but that never seems to stop everyone from gathering in the kitchen and getting involved.

            My mom just purchased a Dean Martin CD, to the frustration of my sister, Maria, because when she arrived the two of them had made a pact that they were not going to spend any money on anything unnecessary. Mom made it about 36 hours before she decided that Dean Martin was a necessary part of our upbringing that she had neglected to expose us to fully when we all lived at home.

            My mind wandered as Dean sang, “When marimba music starts to play… Dance with me, hold me, sway…”

            I’m here with my daughter, Kaitlin. Over the past six months my father’s Alzheimer’s has gotten worse. Now he is completely bedridden. Seizures rack his body every time he tries to sit or stand and he can hardly remember from minute to minute where he is. My mother has been caring for him at home and we have all started to take the four-hour drive down south more frequently to help my mother where we can, although there seems to be very little we can do.

            Katie, Maria and my brother, Brigham have been helping me clear out one of the downstairs rooms to prepare it for another visit in a month or so, when we can tear up the awful faux wood parquet flooring and lay tile down, as we’ve done with practically the entire upstairs. It’s a project that started about seven years ago, when my mother’s asthma was so bad the doctor suggested getting rid of anything that could collect dust – including carpet.

            How quickly things change. There was a time when I was sure my dad would outlive my mother. A year ago, my dad was doing pretty well. The doctors had warned us that it would get worse, and my dad had already voluntarily given up his driver’s license after an incident where he forgot where he was while sitting at an intersection. I pulled up a picture of him not too long ago, sitting with the kids in the living room. He was still carrying the weight he had put on at middle age and I think, after being so thin well into his 40’s he wore it somewhat as a badge of honor. Now he is so thin I can wrap my fingers around his forearm and touch them together. His skin has turned translucent and his eyes are wrapped in eyelids so thin I wonder if he can still see the light when he closes his eyes. His salt and pepper hair has turned to wispy shocks of white.

            I first realized my dad was starting to lose his mind a few years ago. I opened the fridge at my parents’ and the door was filled with about 15 bottles of mustard of every variety you can imagine. I asked my mom about it and she said; “Talk to your father. He won’t leave the store without a bottle of mustard. Better yet, take some with you, because we’ll have twice that much in a couple of weeks!”

            After the mustard, it was recipes. Dad would walk up the street to the dentist’s office and collect all of their old magazines. He’d cut out the recipes and catalogue them into three-ring binders. When I’d go down to visit, he would give me binders of recipes meticulously filed, but in no order that I could ever decipher. He told me he had never tried a single one – he doesn’t like to cook.  I gratefully took the binders and walked them out to the dumpster. When the dentist’s office started complaining about my dad coming up to take the magazines out of the waiting room that they were still using, neighbors started bringing him their old magazines. As we were cleaning out the downstairs room, we came across four or five boxes full of magazines virtually untouched, except for where the recipes had been cut out of them. It took me a while to figure out that my dad, who used to be a voracious reader, could no longer follow a book from cover to cover. He would still read the newspaper, and I think he liked recipes because they are broken into small sections he could digest before he forgot what he was doing altogether.

            My father can’t get out of bed now.

            He believes he painted the watercolors and poster of Picasso’s The Lovers on the wall. My mother has moved nearly every picture he loves into the bedroom so he can see them. He thinks the picture of early Mormon leader Brigham Young mounted on the far wall is George W. Bush, and he thinks I’m a handyman my mother hired.

            All weekend I have tried to break away from the work downstairs now and then to just sit and talk to my dad. The conversations go nowhere, but now and then he remembers.

            “Are you part of our group?” he asks me.

            “I’m your third son, Manny, dad.”

            “Oh! That’s right!” The name rings a bell.

            “And you know Josh?”

            “Yep. Josh is my son.” For some reason, he always remembers Joshua.

            “We both have good kids, don’t we?”

            “We do, dad.”

            “I haven’t seen any of my kids in years” he says, and the conversation starts all over again.

            I tell him where he lives and that he’s married. I tell him stories about walking with him in Manti Canyon and how he knew the names of every flower and bush – not the scientific names, but the names the sheepherders call them. Names like stinkweed, quakies, lamb’s ears and monk’s hood.

He asks if I’ve seen his mother and I have to remind him that she died about ten years ago.

            “That’s right,” he says pensively, and it pains me as he relives the moment again.

I tell him that I’m going camping in Escalante with some friends in a few weeks and he begs me to take him with me. I instantly have this fantasy of packing him away and enjoying one more evening around a campfire listening to him tell stories of spending the summers in Mayfield Canyon herding sheep with his father and his uncle, or having him bend a young aspen over so I could ride it like we did when we were little. I wish I could.  If I could be sure that seizures wouldn’t tear at his body when he sat upright, and that he wouldn’t be frightened and disoriented before we even left the driveway in the condominiums, I would.

            My dad is a different man in the mountains. He even talks different. Most of the time, I don’t even hear my dad’s Southern Utah drawl. It only comes out when he is very angry or very relaxed. Once, when I was little, we were helping him string Christmas lights on a tree. The activity had turned into an all-day affair and now he was yelling at Karl and me to fetch him the card. We didn’t have any idea what card he needed and we could tell he was about to blow his stack.

            He just kept yelling “Somebody please hand me the card!”

            “What card?”

            “The electrical card! For Pete’s sake, don’t either of you know what a card is?”

            “Oh!” we said in tandem, “The CORD?”

            “What in hell’s name do you think I’ve been asking for all this time?” he said with a frustrated strain in his voice.

            Just then my mother popped her head in with a look that said she feared we were going to actually answer him, handed him the extension cord and shuffled us out of the room.

            In the mountains his speech was different altogether. His words came slowly, as if every one had to be properly chewed first.  He would stand with his hands behind his back as he stared into the fire and tell stories in little bursts with long pauses in between. I always felt that he was remembering every detail but he was only sharing the highlights. He’d look over the top of his glasses with a raised eyebrow when he imitated his father, in the same manner I remember my grandpa talking to me. In fact, maybe I don’t remember my grandfather as much as I remember my dad’s characterization of him.

            While I’m cooking, my mom is telling us about the neighbors. She talks as if we know them all, even though none of us have lived here for at least a decade and the condos next to hers have probably switched hands three times since then.

            The neighbor kids have been coming over to visit my dad every day. I thought this was wonderful, until my mom gets to the part where she found out they were coming over to visit him and then they raided the box of matchbox cars in the front room that my mom has for the grandkids and over time, they have stolen nearly all of them.

            In the other ear, Sara is talking about whom she has seen come into Christensen’s department store, where she works as a buyer, that Maria would have known from high school and college, and who is married to who, and any other happenings around St. George that she can think of. Dean Martin is still playing and it’s hard to focus on one level of the conversation.

            Instead, I just watch my mother and my sisters do their thing. Sara spontaneously starts cutting tomatoes and adding them to the pot. My mother has some rosemary that she picked out of the hodgepodge of flowers, herbs and vines she has growing in the little garden in front of her house and she throws a sprig in with the chicken as I turn it over in the pan. Maria is slicing bread and arranging it on a hand-thrown plate that my parents picked up on one of their excursions over the 41 years they have been married. (Most of their outings and vacations are commemorated in pieces of pottery they have collected over the years.) My mother talks about how Dean Martin reminds her of when the Italians would all tune their radios to the same station when she was my daughter’s age and put them out on the porches in the evenings so you could walk up and down the street and still hear the music, like an impromptu promenade on summer evenings, and I can’t help but think of how different her life in the West is now, compared to the 50’s in Pennsylvania.

            Katie sits and listens and laughs with them. I want to tell her to savor this.

In this moment, she has become a part of this beautiful line of strong and confident women that runs through her grandmother, her aunts and her mother into her. They are all a part of what has shaped her. Katie even looks like my mother did in photos of her on her honeymoon, when she was barely six years older than Katie is now.

These are the moments that she should remember. These are the events she should write in her journal. The father in me wants to compel her to make this a keystone in her limited experience as a young woman, but I don’t say a word. Somehow, it feels like defining the moment would kill the spontaneity and the elegant simplicity of it. There is the danger of talking it to death, as I’ve been known to do. Maybe it’s better that we remember moments in our own way.

Two weeks later, I awake to the first light of the morning hitting the side of my tent in the Cedar Mesa campground, on a remote section of Capitol Reef National Park. I take my cup of orange tea and wander alone, down the rough track that passes for a road to meet the sun as it rises over the bentonite hills and the purple-gray mesas to the east.

I have come here with three old friends and hiking companions of mine, and two new ones who have come from Missouri to see Utah’s wilderness for the first time.

I think of my father and how much he would have loved this.

The last time I went camping with my dad was along the Burr Trail. My mother was doing fieldwork with archaeologists from Utah State University in Boulder, on the west end of the Burr Trail. We camped at Deer Creek – a strange choice if you know my dad’s and my shared phobia toward snakes. I have never camped at Deer Creek without seeing at least one. On this same trip, my mom and I came ten feet away from stepping on a diamondback rattler before the archaeologist we were talking to saw it and casually pulled his truck up to park right on top of it.

My dad didn’t come out on the dig with us. Even then his age was starting to catch up with him, though his mind was still sharp. He stayed in camp and talked to the little kids in the surrounding camp spots. In the evening he found a dead snake in the bushes and pulled it out to show the little German girl who had taken to calling him grandpa.  I have a picture of my dad holding the snake. In it, you can tell that the mere act of pinching the dead reptile in two fingers by the tail to hold it up for display goes against every fiber in his being, but he tries not to show it. The result is a kind of forced smile and half-grimace that grips his face as he holds his trophy up for the camera.

 For a long time, I sit on a small, rough table of white sandstone in the quiet and still, arid morning and I am suddenly overwhelmed by an immense melancholy for my dad at the thought that he will never be able to wander in the desert again. This is the first time I have ever thought that I may never again see in my dad’s eyes or his deliberate gait, the reverence for the wild areas where he seems truly at home. 

In a few moments, my mood evaporates as the sunrise breaks across the mesa and pushes the shadows to cower on the western edges of the cedar-dappled hills. In my head I can hear a light accordion play, and I softly whistle a Dean Martin tune as I amble back to camp.