Observations on quality time with my 84 year old father, day 23

• Verbatim driving conversation
o Me – “Dad, are you checking out the ladies?”
o Dad – “I’m just looking at their hair.”
I’m thinking: ‘The ladies don’t have hair where you’re looking dad.’

• My wife and daughter came into town and joined me and my sisters to look through my mother’s clothing and jewelry. We had to assess what should be sold, kept for sentimental value or thrown out. I thought my father would join in and enjoy the time with his family. Even the sister who treats my father like he has the plague was there and acting pleasant. Like he did while my mother was in the hospital, he left after only a few minutes “to get coffee.” It comes down to the fact that he can’t get emotional in front of his children. I understand this whole “be a man” thing, and it can be embarrassing crying in public, but even Nixon cried at his wife’s funeral. Heck, I cried like a baby on my daughter’s shoulder a few months ago after it became apparent that my mother was not going to live much longer…sure, I had a few cosmopolitans to stoke the boiler, but if you can’t cry over your closest loved ones who can you cry about? Maybe he needs to drink something a little stronger than prune juice? Maybe I need to visit the dive bar real soon…I mean, eat some Korean food? Heck: I should just throw caution to the wind and take him to the dive bar. I bet we have some real quality time then!

• A friend of his tried contacting him on the facebook page he knew nothing about. As this fellow knows something about computers (according to the pre-senility mind of my dad), he wants to speak to him. I know what this means: it has to do with his long running efforts to get an appeal and new trial for his arson and insurance fraud conviction from the mid-90’s. He believes there is suppressed evidence that will “exonerate” him (What a pompous word, “exonerate”. He can’t say “prove my innocence”. He has to say “exonerate”) It’s also something I want nothing to do with. I told my dad I’d give this computer genius his phone number but I wasn’t getting involved in anything more than that. They spoke on the phone and my father wrote down his e-mail address to exchange more details.

o Dad – “Here’s his e-mail address Curt. Write him an e-mail.”
o Me – “Dad, you know how to write e-mails. I don’t want any part of this.”
o Dad – “I forget how to do it.”
o Me – “Let me see the address…….Dad: what is that?”
o Dad – “That’s his e-mail address.”
o Me – “It says ‘chengo#2’. That’s it? No “@ anything dot something’?”
o Dad – “Nope that’s what he gave me.”

After a large sigh, I contacted the computer genius again and got an actual e-mail address. By the way: My dad thinks anyone who can print a page of a Microsoft word document is a computer genius. I also think he’s guilty as hell.

© Curt Weiss 2014

Observations on quality time with my 84 year old father, day 22

• “What does your daughter eat for breakfast?”
This is what constitutes “one on one quality time” for my dad.

• He doesn’t seem to watch any television programs through to completion. Here’s what was watched in a 30 minute period last night:
o C-Span
o The Bible Rules (History Channel)
o Life Below Zero (National Geographic)
o Fox News
o MSNBC
o Good Luck Charlie (Disney Channel)

Who said there’s nothing good on TV anymore? I heard some Spanish language TV as well. This is what I call ‘Short Attention Span Syndrome.” What next? BET? The Weather Channel? Real Housewives of Atlanta? I’ll have to ask him for some reviews. That should be entertaining.

• After speaking to the building manager of a complex in Inglewood, my dad said we needed to check out a HUD subsidized apartment.
o Me – ‘Dad, did you actually speak with someone that said to come out there?”
o Dad – “Yes, they said I could see an apartment.”

Well, if you’ve read any of these entries over the last three weeks, you probably know what happened next: They only had applications to get on a waiting list that was 80-90 people long. He also shouldn’t expect to get an apartment there for 9 – 18 months. They could have e-mailed the application to us.

I just can’t trust his evaluative skills. Hell, I can’t trust him even for the weather report. I did completely ignore his driving instructions to Inglewood though and trusted the GPS. Better living through technology.

© Curt Weiss 2014

Observations on quality time with my 84 year old father, day 21

“Look at that fella. He’s gotta have diabetes.”

If you think you’re too fat, too skinny, have bad skin, a big butt or any sort of physical appearance phobia, you can be sure that my father will notice. I kind of think my thighs look like Patrick Starfish’s head, but my father’s never seen “Spongebob Squarepants”.

He hasn’t stopped trying to get me to go to the gym with him since I got here, which is his way of saying, “You’re fat.” He doesn’t realize that those are my moments of solace when I don’t have to be concerned with his every demented request. It’s a short, yet pleasant, respite.

I need my buffer zone back. When it came to parents Jerry Seinfeld understood:

“Any thought pops into their head… I’m used to a 1200-mile buffer zone. I can’t handle this. Plus, I’ve got the dinners, I’ve got the pop-in’s. They pop-in! It’s brutal.”

It’s a continuous brutal pop-in, living with him. Nope: not going to the gym.

Another reason I’m not going to the gym with him is that’s his social circle and every out of work actor or screenwriter he’s befriended will be thrust upon me. He’ll say I work in the movie business (I don’t) or that my sister won an Emmy (not even nominated) and start working out some deal where the two of them are writing a screenplay and I’ll finance it and sell it. “You can rep it,” he’d say, as if he’s offering me a gift.
Once back in the 90’s I walked into the gym with him and I was traumatized for life. This was the day I met Captain Cool.

Captain Cool was another out of work actor/screenwriter. He had a skit he would do for schools and youth centers in and around LA to get kids to keep away from drugs. As if kids believe an adult is cool because he says he is. My father had met him and somehow thought his own son, who’d never financed more than a small starter home in Haller Lake, Washington, was going to finance and sell a kids TV series for PBS. I had worked with people who did this, but I didn’t know how to do this, nor did I want to. I appreciate my father’s confidence in me but…well actually, it was more a sign of his own desperation. He had already been indicted for arson and insurance fraud and was out awaiting his trial. He’d lost everything in the process and was trying to come up with a big score.

So, under the guise of “Come with me for a ride. I need your help in carrying something”, I take a ride with him. We get to the YMCA. “I just need to pick something up. Come in with me. It’ll just take a minute.” After I come in, I see a man sparing in the boxing ring. He sees my father, stops sparring and bounds on over. “Lou, is this your son?” My father had barely gotten the word “yes” out of his mouth, when this sweaty little man puts his arms around me and kisses me. “He kisses everyone,” my father later told me. “You think he could do that after he showers and dries off? He’s permanently stained my clothing!” My father told him that I work for “PBS, Channel 13.” Wrong: I worked for a local PBS affiliate in Seattle named KCTS and we were channel 9. “Curt’s going to help us get this financed and sold.” The rest of the conversation was a blur as my irate mind could only see red. When we got out of there I said, “Dad, what are you talking about? I can’t do any of those things. Leave me out of this. I’m on vacation!”

He had blind-sided me with the old “reverse pop-in” tactic. A brilliant pincer move on his part. And I fell for it.

Never forget these three rules:
1. Never tell him what you do for a living
2. Never go to the gym with him
3. Keep your buffer zone

Whatever you do, beware of the pop-in. It’s brutal.

© Curt Weiss 2014

Observations on quality time with my 84 year old father, day 20

• “That neighbor of mine I introduced you to: she’s got to be at least 275 pounds…and at least 175 of it is breasts.”

• April Fools day with my father. Guess which one really happened:
o After speaking with his agent, he’s releasing his fifth book of poetry, titled, “Sonnets, Odes and Haikus: How I Mastered them All.”
o Take him to the local NPR station to speak about business ethics and management challenges in the modern workplace.
o Volunteers at the Y to help underprivileged youth.
o Contacts social security to inquire as to how to return an overpayment.
o Purchases the Kindle version of “The Monastic Life: Giving More and Living with Less”.
o Has a conference call with his attorney and management team to discuss his multiple screenplay offers. Leaning towards Harvey Weinstein as he’s a nice Jewish boy.
o Stop at Ralphs to buy dinner

• Like most of us, he struggles with bureaucracies. However, while most of us will try and work things out over the phone, he wants to go to the source. He had me take him to three different offices yesterday to seek help in finding affordable housing. Each time, it turns out to be an administrative building where they either hand you a pamphlet or a phone to leave a message whereby someone will call you back to set up an appointment. What he doesn’t seem to recall is, he did much of this two months ago. My sister and I got a social worker to assist him in this process. My dad’s expectations were unreasonable and they refused to work with him after only two days.

It’s only going to get worse.

© Curt Weiss 2014

Observations on quality time with my 84 year old father, day 19

• You may recall that on day one of this chronicle, I mentioned my father’s difficulties with his cell phone. I recently retrieved a bag of clothing and other personal items of my mothers, from a convalescent home she stayed at in Sunland, California, a few weeks before she passed. Among the items found was a red cell phone in a black case. In the black case was a folded up piece of paper with different family member’s phone numbers on it. The hand writing is unmistakably my fathers. Put aside for a moment the fact that a cell phone, which contains a built in contact list, is housed in a case with numbers scratched on a piece of paper. The obvious question is whose red cell phone did I find nineteen days ago? Sadly, there were no Direct TV remotes in the bag.

• As my father will be losing my mother’s social security income, he is rightly concerned about money. His answer? Get a literary agent. How will he do this? Research the process? Nope. Attend writer’s conferences where you pitch your book to agents? Nope. Write query letters? Nope:

o “I’m going to have to bug your brother-in-law about finding me an agent.”

My brother in law is a commercial TV agent. He helps actors land parts in TV commercials. In the words of my sister, “It’s like asking Picasso to paint your house because he’s a painter.” My father has been told this before, but he either refuses to believe it or doesn’t understand it.

It’s Groundhog’s day again and my brain hurts.

• Various lessons learned after five trips to visit my father since August:
o Stop buying travel sized anything. I’ve been here five times since August so I need to just buy full sized everything once I get here and leave it here. I’ll be back soon enough. Also, my mother left two hair dryers, so I need to stop bringing one.
o Always bring your worst underwear (waistband fraying, small hole in it, etc) and just toss it before returning home.
o Cool it with the booze. I may be close by the local tiki hut and be tempted to have one (read “five”) of those fruity cocktails that go down so easy, but it takes its toll. I need patience for the family (read “father”) and my wits for fending off his requests to find him an agent or a lawyer. And I don’t want to lose my cell phone…on the kitchen table (yeah, I did that). Plus the bruises and cuts from rolling in the gutter can’t be covered up in the summer when I wear shorts (this doesn’t mean it’s OK to drink during the other three seasons though.)
o Read the parking signs and write down where I parked in my phone’s note pad. The time the car needs to be moved should go into the phone’s calendar (another reason not to lose the phone on the kitchen table)
o Call my wife and daughter every night before I go to bed or their bedtime, whichever one is earlier (another reason not to lose the phone on the kitchen table)
o Get my fiber and eat my veggies. It’s hard to do when I’m stressed and only a few blocks from the Bun Shop and King of NY Pizza.
o Bring ear plugs (Jeezus that TV’s loud!)

© Curt Weiss 2014

Observations on quality time with my 84 year old father, day 18

• Dad – “I gotta get another TV. This one’s boring.”

Did my dad suddenly go all Punk Rock on me?

• Cable TV issues part 3:

It seems he was getting charged for both Direct TV and AT&T’s U-Verse simultaneously because he hadn’t returned the Direct TV receivers. He got them to send him two cartons with postage paid to return them. He can only find one receiver.

o Dad – “What’s that?”
o Me – “It’s a DVD player dad. That’s not what we’re looking for”
o Dad – “Send them that!”
o Me – “Dad, that’s not what they’re looking for, and anyway, you own it.”
o Dad – “Doesn’t matter. Just send it!”

Why not just send them a toaster oven? By the way: I found the other receiver behind a table covered in dust. The remotes are still missing though. Perhaps we could send them an unused cell phone instead?

• Early in my mother’s health decline, she spelled out a number of things she expected of him. This included spending lots of time with her while she was infirmed. It’s not as if he has a job. This has always been a battle with him. He’d arrive at the facility in the early afternoon, spend ten minutes with her, disappear to get some coffee for an hour, spend ten more minutes with her, try to get her into a wheelchair for a five to ten minute walk (sometimes resulting in “Weekend At Bernie’s” type moments), harangue some staffers and want to leave.

o Dad – “Why do we need to leave the house at 9:30 in the morning? What’s so special about that time?”
o Me – “It’s just after rush hour dad. We can stay until three and beat it back. You’ll have plenty of time to go to the gym. We could always leave earlier and be resigned to driving in rush hour to get there earlier if you want?”
o Dad – “I don’t understand why we need to get there so early? She doesn’t even recognize me anymore.”
o Me – “Actually, she did say your name when she saw you yesterday and made a motion as if trying to kiss you.

She’s said since July that she wants you there with her. She’s not expected to live another two weeks dad. At least give her that. You can bring your crossword puzzle with you.”

This was the third day in a row I had to explain this to him. My sister’s been saying it since July as well as my mom when she could still communicate clearly. “I still don’t know why your sister was mad at me,” he’d say. (It’s worth noting that when he’s happy with her, he uses her name. When not, she’s ‘your sister’.) It was like living in the movie “Groundhog Day.” I guilted him into doing this once but the next day he said he needed more rest before leaving the house. He comes from a time and place where men stayed in the waiting room while their wives gave birth. I came from a time where I was expected to be there in the room coaching my wife to take deep breaths and hold her hand while the doctor said “Push!”

When my mom finally passed, my sister and I were there with her while he was off getting a Mocha Frappuccino. I’m not angry. It actually seems fitting.

© Curt Weiss 2015

Observations on quality time with my 84 year old father, day 17 – SPECIAL ELISSA WEISS MEMORIAL EDITION

• As some of you may know, my mother Elissa passed away yesterday after a long period of illness. In the evening, I convinced my dad to have dinner out with me, my older sister, her husband and two daughters. While dining, all of the adults, except my father, had a few drinks. To help plan a memorial, my brother in-law took notes and asked questions about my mother. My father remembered meeting my mother and their first few dates back in 1957:

o Dad – “I was hanging out on the corner with my friends in the old neighborhood (President Street in Brooklyn), just watching the girls go by, when I saw Elissa. I told my friends, ‘I’m going to marry that girl someday.’ Soon enough it was Valentine’s Day. I went to Barton’s Candy Store to buy a box of candy for another girl and Elissa was working there. Before I left I asked her out on a date. We started dating and in a few weeks, went to Puerto Rico and got married.”
o Sister – “I always suspected that mom was pregnant with me before you were married.”
o Dad – “Nope. She had an abortion and then we were married. That all happened in Puerto Rico. When we got back, we were also married by a Rabbi in Brooklyn. You were born the next year.”
o Sister – “Lou Weiss, you were a f*cking playa !!!!”
o Me – “Dad, didn’t you tell mom you were only 22, when you were really 27?”
o Dad – “She told ME she was 22, but was really only 17.”
After fifty-seven years, the truth is revealed…

• At dinner, in spite of all sorts of fish and steaks on the menu, my father ordered a hamburger, well done. He barely touched it. Later, he said it was “dry as a bone.” I said “Dad, you did order it well done. What did you expect?” “I didn’t order it any kind of done” he scoffed.

When he got home, he made his regular, full dinner, microwave explosions included. I can hear my mother now: “He still can’t order by himself.”

• Through all the months of my mother’s progressing illnesses, she had a persisting pressure ulcer at the base of her spine. This caused her much pain and sometimes she would literally say, “My ass is killing me!” During her last weeks in hospice care, there was another patient who was a cantankerous old fellow, with a thick New York accent. In spite of the angelic staff, who handled my mother with delicacy and dignity right up until the end, he would say things like “Does anybody speak English around here?” or “Where the hell’s my doctor! You people don’t know anything!” Literally, at the moment where I realized that my mother had stopped breathing, I swear that Mr. Cantankerous himself yelled out “My ass is killing me!” It was almost as if the evil mojo spirit had finally left her body and found the most unpleasant prick in the vicinity to inhabit.

No more pain mom.

© Curt Weiss 2014

Observations on quality time with my 84 year old father, day 16:

• Driving with dad:
o Dad – “Make a left turn here.”
o Me – “I can’t.”
o Dad – “Why not?”
o Me – “Because I’ll drive into that building.”
o Dad – “That’s a stupid place to put a building.”

• After Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” comes on the radio, he reminisces:
o Dad – “This song brings me back to the west village. Every once in a while I went to this bar with some friends. I didn’t drink much, but sometimes we’d just hang out there after work. Robert DeNiro used to hang out there too.”
o Me – “Were you married yet?”
o Dad – “Yeah, I was about 32 (note: this song came out in 1971 when he was 41). Somehow I got into something with someone and the bouncer threw me out. I don’t want to tell you what I was doing there. Heh, heh. Let’s just say your father isn’t perfect.”

Really? Every day brings new surprises with him.

• As much as he doesn’t listen to any doctors, ironically, he still believes there’s a medical solution for all ailments. It just needs to be of his own discovery. As TV Guide isn’t widely available anymore, he has to read ads and articles somewhere else. Sometimes he just invents memories. His present invented memory/obsession is with stem cell therapy:
o Dad – “I met a doctor at the gym who saved his wife’s life through stem cell therapy.”
(As I’ve mentioned before, it’s always trouble when any statement of his starts out with some version of “I met a guy at the gym”)
o Me – “Dad, they won’t take her in any clinical or experimental program. She’s got too many other issues and she’s too old.”
o Dad – “We don’t have to tell them that other stuff.”
o Me – “Do you actually think they’re not going to notice the dialysis port in her neck?”

I really need to memorize the Serenity Prayer…

© Curt Weiss 2014

Observations on quality time with my 84 year old father, day 15:

• “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” – ‘The Boxer’ by Paul Simon

I don’t know if its life imitating art or the other way around, but my father, who boxed in his teens and twenties, and was always in and around the boxing world, never seems to fully grasp what the doctors, or in fact, any authority figure seems to tell him. On top of that, he will interpret it in a way that justifies his belief system or in some way is to his advantage. No matter what the hospital administrators tell him, he seems to think it means he pays nothing, and they in fact owe HIM money, in spite of them saying the opposite. Regardless of what any doctor says about my mother’s realistic options, he interprets it to mean she’ll have lifesaving heart surgery, although my sisters and I heard them say she’s too sick for any surgery. He’s convinced that one doctor confirmed his theory on why she got endocarditis (heart valve infection), thereby confirming his pursuit of a malpractice suit, while I stood there and heard nothing of the sort. My sister and I are constantly running interference between him and nurses, doctors and admins. One even asked, “Does your father have cognition issues?”

“…he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down or cut him…”

He’s a Freudian field day for a roomful of psychiatrists. I’d say he’s a full chapter in their text book but
then he’d want an agent’s cut.

• He said that he had a 1:30 doctor’s appointment today. Turns out it was yesterday. That’s one less thing on my “to do” list.

o Dad – “I forgot the doctor’s appointment was yesterday, not today. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached”
o Me – “Dad, maybe you should re-consider taking that prescription for your short term memory issues that had the possible side effects you were so concerned about?
o Dad – “What prescription?”

• He knocked on the door of my room and woke me up to tell me that his friend called and he’ll call him back. As if I care.

o Dad – “Why are you sleeping?”
o Me – “Because it’s late and I’m tired.”

Five minutes later he woke me up again to say the neighbor came back early and I need to get out of the parking space tomorrow. Then he woke me for a third time, wanting to know if I wanted a sleeping pill.

I don’t need a sleeping pill. I just need him to stop waking me up and I’ll sleep just fine.

© Curt Weiss 2014