“What do you think of Valentine’s Day?” I ask my father as we’re walking down Sams Point Road. We have to raise our voices to be heard. It’s Saturday morning—January 13th—and the traffic is heavy.
“Zoom, zoom, zoom,” Dad says as a large truck roars past. Then he looks over at me to see if I approve of his sound effects.
I smile.
“It’s a nice day,” Dad says about February 14th. “I’d like to get something for your mother. Maybe you can take me to that store around the corner.”
When he points, I say, “Walmart?” even though it’s a few miles away, not around the corner, and in the exact opposite direction of his extended his finger.
“Yeah,” he says. “They have lots of good stuff there.”
“What do you want to get Mom for Valentine’s Day?”
Across the street from our sleepy Spanish-moss laden development, we turn into another sleepy Spanish-moss-laden neighborhood, where we hardly ever see a moving vehicle and can use our regular speaking voices.
“Well,” Dad says, “your mother doesn’t need candy.”
“Why?”
“I think she sneaks a lot of sweets when I’m not looking.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he says. “But she plays tennis to keep her weight down. We walk a lot together. So she still looks good.”
I laugh. Alzheimer’s produces these moments of raw honesty and my father often manages to steer what initially seems like an insult into a compliment, which I find charming.
When I think back to my childhood, I can’t remember my father ever giving my mother a single compliment or buying anyone a gift.
“So what can we get Mom?” I ask.
“I think we can buy her some pajamas at that big store.”
“Walmart?”
“They have everything there. Stuff that mom will like. I’m pretty sure they’ll have pajamas.”
Suddenly, I realize that I’ve once again maneuvered myself into a moral quandary.
My father loves going to Walmart. It just lights him up. He enjoys exploring the many aisles and picking stuff out for my mother. He’ll look at me to see whether he is making sound choices and I’ll just mirror back to him that he is, because it makes the little boy trapped inside my dad come alive again. I didn’t get to see Dad smile very often when I was a kid and I very seldom saw my father being joyful or giving. Surprisingly, Walmart brings out the best in him.
When my siblings and I were younger, my mother picked out most of the gifts for our family, including the ones my father gave her. So it’s fascinating to set Dad free in a gigantic store with endless possibilities. I study him. See what catches his attention and then reinforce whatever his natural inclinations may be. It’s like meeting the hidden young version of my dad for the first time. I don’t think he got a lot of positive reinforcement when he was small, and the little boy that’s still in my father guzzles my encouragement as if he’s been dying of thirst for seventy-six years.
Sometimes Dad picks gifts that—at least initially—seem wildly off the mark, especially when it comes to my mother. During a Walmart run we made when Mom was away visiting my nephews in early December, I let Dad pick out welcome-home gifts for his wife. He immediately selected Christmas ornaments that egregiously clashed with my mother’s holiday aesthetic. If you had actively tried to pick out mismatches, you couldn’t have done better. He got her a head massager that I think he wanted her to use on him. He bought her a piece of prepackaged lemon cake that I saw—still fully wrapped in plastic—in their fridge weeks later. And he picked out an ugly Christmas sweater featuring what I believe is meant to be a French bulldog. My mother is always smartly dressed—even when we go out for weekly pizza—and doesn’t really do irony; so giving her an ugly Christmas sweater is akin to egging and toilet papering her immaculately kept house. But my dad was not trying to be cruel or ironic. He really thought Mom would appreciate the holiday top. “She likes dogs and Christmas,” Dad had reasoned and he wasn’t wrong. But my mother absolutely loathes kitsch, which, of course, made the whole situation hilariously loaded.
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