My father passed his last days in a nursing home. Twice a month I traveled north on the Fung Wah bus. His assisted care facility was a twenty minute ride from the South Station. Few of the commuters walked in the direction of nursing home. Most of them got into cars. They stared at me. Pedestrians are an anomaly in the suburbs.
The orderlies and staff cared for my father with TLC. His affliction had stolen his memory. The 89 year-old Maine native repeated questions about where I lived and what I did for work time and time again.
His other favorite comment was about the view from his window.
“There are a lot of trees.”
“Yes, there are.” The doctor had suggested to my family to keep conversations simple.
“You know I outlived most of my generation?”
“Me too.” At 58 many of my friends had been promoted to the next plane.
“Not like me. Sometimes I feel like the last dinosaur. The last of my kind. No one will remember Lowery’s soda fountain in Maine or your mother’s smile or Ish Kabibble.” It was a rare occurrence when my father emerged from the fog of Alzheimer’s.
“He played coronet for the Kay Kaiser band.”
“And told a joke about his friend receiving $250,000.”
“I never heard that joke.”
“Don’t expect me to tell you it. I’m taking it to my grave.”
“That won’t be for a long time.”
“Don’t bullshit me.” His language was spicy these days. He never talked like that when I was young. “I’m like a do-do bird. On the brink of extinction. Where is it you work?”
“The last do-do bird was killed back in the 1600s.”
“What’s a do-do bird?” He was back under the mist.
“Where is it you work?”
I told him again and again, thinking about the do-do bird and the thousands of species exterminated by Man; the passenger pigeon, T-Rex, and several races of humans.
My father shut his eyes. His snoring was music to my ears. I sat in his room and recalled a newspaper artictwo that two Georgia police officers had discovered a 7’7′ corpse of Bigfoot, the mythic man-ape, in the rugged woods of Southern Appalachia.
Field and Stream has been offering a $1,000,000 reward for the first person to verify the existence of Sasquatch. Mammalogoists were fast to discount the Georgia policemen’s discovery as a hoax foisted on a gullible public. Georgia is a long way from Bigfoot’s stomping grounds of the Pacific Northwest.
“The last do-do bird,” my father muttered from his pillow. He looked at peace. There was no telling how long he might sleep.
“You’re no do-do bird.” I stroked his forehead. The skin was smooth for a man his age. I attributed the youthful look to the wine drinking of his latter years. He looked down on beer drinkers and I recalled the extinction of a beer in Thailand.
Several years ago Thai authorities revoked the beer license for Carlsberg. The Danish beer was too much competition for the local beers and Heinekin. Karlsburg vanished from Pattaya like the Colorado disappearing from its delta on the Sea of Cortez.
Khang was too strong for my tastes, Singha was sour, and Heineken had outlived its thirst quenchability in the 80s. Faced with bad beer I resumed drinking vodka-tonics. They got me drunk fast.
A good break from the wickedness of Pattaya was a ferry ride to Koh Lann across the bay. I brought my bike to exercise my legs. A man has to keep fit.
While waiting for the last ferry to depart for the mainland, I sat a a small shop. The girl behind the counter was cute. She would have been the top star at most go-go bars. Se smiled with an endangered innocence and I reached into the cold storage for a beer.
They had Karlsberg.
Two cases.
I drank the first one in a matter of seconds. I asked how much for the rest.
Barely $60.
I loaded them onto the ferry.
Within two weeks they were gone.
I had drunk them into extinction like the Dutch colonists killing the do-do birds. I touched my father’s hand. He would never come out of this and today was better than many that he was facing in the future.
But at least there was a future.
He was not a dodo bird,
He was my father.