“Feeling better?” Dad asked this morning.

“Was I feeling bad?” I asked in return.

“You seemed at a low ebb,” he said. “On your blog.”

It’s funny that he keeps up to date with my heights and valleys through essays that I write about him, that any conversation we have may or may not end up here, and he will have the experience of reliving his life through my eyes. Very post-Post Modern.

“I’m fine. I just canned my first carrots,” I said.

“Really? That’s great!”

I’ve never used a canner before, but my husband keeps growing more and more vegetables every year so it seemed inevitable that at some point we arrive at the canning stage. And Dad bought me the canner for Christmas last year so he has a benign, if removed, interest in my canning progress. Plus, he probably wants to make sure I don’t blow anything up.

We chatted about pickled carrots and his memories of canning with his Grandma. “You really had to wrench down the lids,” he recalled. “And those rubber washers that kept the lid down had a little bump on them that you would pull to break the seal. Funny how it all comes flooding back. They would can a huge amount every year. I guess it was such a pain in the ass they had to make it all worth while.”

“It’s seems pretty rustic in here,” I said, looking around the kitchen.

Rustic in this case means chaotic, but a chaos filled with Mason jars, lids and pectin lying everywhere, waiting for the next grand experiment: blueberry jam. Do we even eat much jam? No. No we do not. And we don’t actually have any room to keep all our new canned goods, but I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we can it. My life is often made up of this cart-before-horse sort of planning.

“I wasn’t that upset,” I said. “I just got fed up with my own whinging. A little ‘Shut up, you big crybaby. You’re life is awesome’.”

“We’ve been blessed,” he agreed. He told me about a co-worker who just died at 59 of a brain tumor. “Compared to that I’ve had a long life. You just never know.”

“You can’t prepare yourself for it, that’s for sure,” I said.

“We’re always prepared for it,” he replied. “Because something may always happen at any moment. We didn’t expect this, but here it is. It’s just the way it is. I deal with whatever my reality is and try to work with what I can. Like being frail.”

After writing about the Half-Shrunk Pop, I wondered how it was for him. We’ve talked about generalities but not the details. “How’s it feel?” I asked him. It felt slightly invasive or over-personal, a bit like an awkward teenager asking an older cousin what sex felt like. Except not titillating.

“I just recognize what’s gone. My shoulder aches because it feels like it has no cartilage in it, probably because it has no cartilage it!” He laughed. “And my foot, even now that it’s getting better, I’m still aware of it all the time, trying to not bring on another flare-up.

“I used to take stairs two at a time, both up and down those cement staircases at school. I walked at such a brisk pace that I would turn around and realize I had lost my party. I’ll never do that again. It’s just gone now.”

He paused and thought about it. “The bus drivers are usually pretty decent about raising and lowering the platform for people who need a little extra time, but you’re often sitting there getting impatient. Or I was. Now I’m on the other side. ‘Sorry folks! Gonna be a while!’ That’s it, there’s nothing else to do but just deal with it.”

When Dad was in pretty rough shape at the beginning of this mess, he wanted to walk to the store for some fresh air but didn’t feel confident enough to do it alone. He feared, reasonably I think, that weakness might overcome him and he would be at the mercy of strangers to help him back home. So I went with him and we slowly made our way to the market a few blocks from his house. As we crossed the parking lot, a car pulled up to exit. We were crossing in front of him, slowly of course; the driver glared at us with such hostility I almost slammed my fist on the hood of his car and felt like ripping out his jugular and throwing it to the crows. Where did he have to go so quickly he couldn’t wait for my father to cross? Did he have to get his granola and instant pizza home in a hurry? A special date with his Trader Joe’s Shu Mai?

The rage I felt was probably intensified by the not-knowingness of Dad’s illness at that point, that plus the surprise I felt seeing my Dad in this condition at all. I too remember Dad taking stairs two at a time, and the brisk pace that left us all in his wake. For such short legs they propelled him with great speed. He always looked like he was in a hurry, even if we were just out for a walk, no destination. He did great in New York City.

Now he’s hindered by so many things: creaky joints, stiff knees, achy feet. Hormone therapy and fragile bones. A catheter. There aren’t any more stairs being leaped in a single bound; he climbs them delicately now. “God knows I don’t want a broken hip!” he laughs.

But there’s no resentment, no bitterness. He’s making whatever still chugs along work in spite of what doesn’t anymore. “I don’t need to have the paint brushes tied to my hands like Renoir or Chuck Close,” he says. “Things are pretty good.”

Things are pretty good.

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