Scared Me a Little

My dad called with some scheme to get me to plot with him to convince some friends of ours to name their baby in a way that would allude to some phrase she always used with my dad. Or so my dad said. I didn’t remember her using this phrase, but my dad and I have such different memories of the church he served when we met her that It’s entirely possible that she could have used this phrase and I just don’t remember it.

Fine.

This happens to me frequently, where someone in my family, usually the Butcher, will remember something I don’t and it makes me feel kind of unmoored from my own past. But then he was filling me in on family stuff and he was telling me about my cousin L. getting his learner’s permit and I said “I didn’t know that.” And my dad said, “Yes you did. You wrote that funny thing on Facebook to his sister about it.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

And so I went and looked and I was, really, afraid. I’m used to losing things that are way past, but to not remember joking with my cousin about a milestone in another cousin’s life? It makes me worried.

I have a shitty body. I don’t want to be trapped in it with a shitty brain.

But I went back and I found the thing he was talking about and I looked through the comments and there was nothing by me there. I read them all to him.

“Oh,” he said, “Well, I thought you had.”

And then, later, he said he was talking to the pastor at the aforementioned church and he gave the pastor a picture of Amy X, who is a person who was in my dad’s first youth group, before I was born.

“Amy X?” I said.

“What? No,” he said. “Amy X?”

“You said ‘Amy X’.”

“Well, no. Amy Y, of course.” Who is a person at that church who had Dad as a minister when she was in high school.

And it was nearly 9:00 at night. And I get loopy and foggy myself.

But my dad, though he has many faults, is sharp.

I hope that’s not changing.