1. Once …

December 21, 2009 at 4:55 pm (Uncategorized)

My dad was diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease in about 2002. He was about 75 years old then. (It’s easy to remember the date, because my siblings and I were planning a surprise 50th wedding anniversary for my parents.) My mother told us about the diagnosis a few days before the party (the surprise had been given away a week earlier). We reeled, but the party, a half-year in the planning, went on. On the day, my dad struggled to remember who a few of the guests were, but otherwise had a great time. He and my mother danced. But the disease hovered over the day like a malevolent cloud.

In hindsight, we think the disease might have started some time earlier. My dad had retired from his medical practice a several years earlier, but kept his license (he could still write prescriptions, treat folks in the neighborhood when called upon). Then, suddenly, he gave it up. He said it was about the malpractice insurance, but we wondered. Around that same time, he also gave up his work as a docent at the medical museum at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital. It is a great museum — full of interesting and odd facts and objects that date to back before the Civil War – and I know my dad had been proud to be there. He was a great docent, too – funny, smart, patient, thoughtful. I wish now I’d seen him do his tour more than once. Once. I always meant to go back and see him do the tour again, but I never got around to it. Once. What else could I possibly have been doing that was so important? This is not my dad, but it could be one of his uncles. My grandfather, his father, emigrated to the United States from Sicily around the turn of the last century. He married my grandmother, who was born in New York City, but whose own father had emigrated some 20 years earlier. They lived in Manhattan’s Little Italy, first on Christie Street, then Forsythe, then Delancey. My grandmother had been very poor growing up – there’d always been enough to eat – they were Italian, after all, but sometimes in winter, she said, snow would get in under the windows, and sit there unmelted for days, because that’s how cold it was in the apartment. To this day, one of my dad’s favorite film’s is Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” tryptych. He especially likes “The Godfather III,” because of its careful depiction of life in Little Italy, with all its hardships and dramas, in the early 1900s.