GRAND Magazine - Spring 2020 - 10

circle of life
Next the gloves. I offer them
to my dad, who holds out his
shaky hand and struggles to slip
one and then the other into the
worn black leather. My grandson,
though, resists, not wanting to
separate his thumb and fingers
before setting them in place in his
new blue mittens. "My hands not
cold," he shouts. And it's true- his
baby hands are warm and supple,
not stiff and gnarled with age like
his great-grandfather's. Those healing hands, whose clean, neat nails
gleamed from weekly manicures,
would fly across the pages of small
white pads scribbling illegible orders.
But lately, my father seems uncertain
with pen in hand; his fingers tremble slightly and
his once-bold signature has become less clear.
Like his vision. A problem with his retina many
years ago cost my father his sight in one eye, and
now the natural process of aging is dimming his
view of the world through the other. A learned
man who loved reading Churchill and often quoted
Shakespeare, knew operas by heart and symphonies by ear, my father can no longer discern clearly
the words of a newspaper despite corrective lenses.
Behind his dark-rimmed glasses, his small brown
eyes are dull and don't match those of my grandson's, big and bright with curiosity about the world.
A city kid, he's learning to read at his young age
10 GRAND

SPRING 2020

from the signs of the subway stations.
What my dad can't see two feet away,
Ben can see in twenty. He can also
hear a train whistle miles away or his
baby sister's cry before I even register the sound. His hearing is acute
and accurate, while for my dad,
the sounds of daily life are muffled and muted much of the time.
Hearing aids worn for years help
him to communicate his needs but
it's hard to engage him in long
conversations.
Though that's probably about
his mind as well. That mind, which
mastered the study of medicine
six decades ago, is slipping now,
his memory mixing up the now and then,
the yesterdays and todays. Not too long ago, my
father learned to use the computer, quite eager
to join the 21st century technology revolution. He
would sit, slouched over, grim-faced with purpose,

I watch them both, taking mental note
of the 83-year age span. Here I am,
somewhere in the middle, buckling them
into seatbelts, cutting their food and
buttering their bread, holding hands
while we walk, dressing them on a cold
winter's day. Babysitting for both.

and peck at the keys with one unsteady finger, no
doubt thinking about the typewriters of the past.
But recently he's lost interest, claiming it too much
effort, the keyboard and commands too confusing
for his aging brain.
Confusing for an octogenarian certainly, but for
a three-year-old child- what fun! Ben was introduced to the computer as an infant, cradled in
his father's lap, mesmerized by the images on the
screen of that magical electronic device. By now
he's mastered the basics and sits by himself on the
desk chair, tall and straight and serious, his eyes
darting over the keyboard, looking for symbols
familiar to him. Then finding them, he uses his little
pointer finger to tap the keys of the four letters
that spell his password, his eyes lighting up and
mouth widening into a big grin as he succeeds.
Sometimes he'll yell, "Wake up, computer!" in his
hurry to get started as he maneuvers the mouse
into action, clicking on his favorite images of subways and trains. Like them, his brain is racing full
throttle, its neurons firing rapidly across synapses.

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Deborah Levin lives in Westchester County, NY with
her husband and lovable Labradoodle. Her work has
been published in the New York Times and Clinical
Social Work journals, Grown and Flown.
Pulse and GRAND Magazine.

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GRAND Magazine - Spring 2020

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