Memory Care
Today I remind my father that he played college baseball with Tom Tresh, A.L. Rookie of the Year for the 1963 Yankees.
My father darkens.
He rolls over in bed, slow, like a bunt going foul. He turns his back to me and faces the wall.
Do you remember the names we picked in Indian Guides? I ask.
Visiting hours are over. No answer.
*
We wore headbands with feathers and red vests with yellow piping and a patch with a teepee. We learned animal tracks, hand signals.
Sunken living rooms. Basements with bars. The fathers chose the ceremonial names, so my father chose ours.
I was Little Straight Arrow. He was Great Bent Arrow.
Knowing grins.
My father and I sit alone at the small table by the brown coffee dispenser in the dining room of the memory care unit.
Jesus is making His way toward the mound, His head down and hands in the pockets of His satin jacket. Until then, my father wears his cowboy hat and cocks one eye at the clock in the corner.
Until then, his lips move and he doesn’t want to look at me. He wavers in his seat like he’s ready to break for home.
*
He still has hair as thick as Pete Rose. It still covers his ears and hangs long at the back of the cowboy hat.
But these are the last days of Great Bent Arrow. Of old, lost Charlie Hustle.
With the slippers by the bed and the hair as white as cocaine.
Bird Report
{A woodpecker—red-bellied?—scales the tree outside my office window like a telephone lineman. Cleated feet and a neck like a snapping turtle that stretches to probe the bark to its left or right without moving its body.}
To be a witness to the violence of the fallen world is only a matter of shifting one’s attention. The woodpecker finds something, and I swear, Father Wendell, I watch it eat it in chattery tremors of swallowing, the bird’s head convulsing like an electrocuted lineman’s might.