Car Talk

Until the end of September, my oldest, a May college graduate, was around to help transport his grandfather. Dad was quieter with me than my oldest. The oldest came home one day somewhat traumatized by Dad's recollection of his childhood dogs: two hit by cars, one by a train. 

But over that time period I began to hear things that turned a light bulb on for me. 

Dad told me more than once on this drive that he had never been on the road on which we traveled to see mom each day. Once when we made a detour, we drove by a building and he told me he'd never seen it before (since this was the route to his favorite used bookstore and the building was fifteen or more years old that seemed unlikely). 

One day he told me, he didn't remember how to get to their house or what it looked like. 

He also told me that one morning he woke up and could not remember who he was or where he was. It had frightened him. 

The final strange thing he told me was that he had strange dreams. In one sequence of dreams, he dreamt an old movie and he had the script exactly correct. Why he saw it the next night and sure enough his dream was correct. A few weeks later after telling me about a trip he and mom had made for an anniversary, he told me the following morning he had a dream about a trip to the place. I asked him if it was about this anniversary trip, he thought for a moment and said yes it had been. 

The light bulb that went on was that I had not been wrong the year before, my Dad had significant memory issues. Near as I could tell he lived in an ever present. His long ago past existed, but nothing probably for the last year or more.