Astoundingly enough, he came back. It took about 9 months, but eventually he came back to his own old self. During that ninemonth he spent the first three or four months completely in outer space. Or, that's how it seemed to us.  To him it must have seemed that he was in a dream, although he has very few memories of that time. Imagine being in a dreamworld in which the seagulls wear raincoats, where your first name changes on odd days of the week and your last name on even days, where the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center is located in New Jersey "to fool the auditors", where singing christmas carols in June is a good idea because "they might move it," where you sleep and drool and learn all over again how to swallow, eat, walk, speak; where having to know your own name is "unfair unless everybody has to do it." That's the world my father lived in for months on end.

This is a man who, before his operation, and now, in his 80th year, sat and still sits on the Boards of Directors of countless museums, schools, conservation organizations and other do-gooder agencies; a volunteer fireman emeritus with 30 years of service, a past president of the Hartford (Conneticut) Symphony Orchestra, past president of the American Society of Chief Financial Officers (or some such. I don't know the real name of the organization. But he was CFO of several large companies, and he was at one point the president of the national CFO society); a man who maintains a regular correspondence with his seven children, their spouses, and his 17 grandchildren, not to mention dozens of friends on several continents, a man who got his accounting degree on the GI bill in night school, Jersey City, after driving 18-wheelers all day subsequent to getting out of the Army Air Corps in which he was a B-29 bombadier-navagator 1944-46. Anyway, after his operation he recapitulated ontogeny, progressing from blob to infant to child to tripping hippie on acid to drunk to very confused person to groggy Dad and eventually; after, as I said, about nine months, to his old (albeit older and tireder) self.

About 8 months into this period, when he could eat and talk and walk and think, but not any of these very well; when he was miraculously showing signs of becoming my father again after more than half a year of being a pathetic, if sometimes cute, alien being from planet bongo-bongo, I visited him. He asked me to change a lightbulb in a recessed fixture in the living room ceiling. He had tried to do it himself, but lacked the balance necessary to stand on a stepladder.

So, I got the stepladder out, and I got a lightbulb. But the fixture was tricky, and I really had to wrestle with it in order to gain a purchase on the old dead bulb and get it out.

And as I was in extemis, grunting, straining to keep my blanance and muttering low curses at whoever had designed such an accursed thing, my father looked up at me, with the innocent, barely comprehending face of a kindergarden child and said, "It's a real bitch kitty, isn't it."

That's the one time in my life I've ever heard anybody use that expression. But it is a great one, isn't it? A real bitch kitty.

And I laughed so that I nearly lost my balance, and then I started to cry a little, and I said, "You're right, Dad. It is a real bitch kitty."

Brown Menace in the Parking Lot

So I'm staying in the Best Western Los Prados Inn, a kind of divey motel in San Mateo that I like very much because of its proximity to the bus line and to a sleazy cheapo strip mall where all the skateboard kids are Mexican-American or Vietnamese-American or Japanese-American or Chinese-American. The other night when I checked in, late, having taken a taxi from San Francisco International Airport at around midnight local time, I got kind of spooked when a security guard announced himself to me, appearing out of nowhere. I thought, "wow, this might not be such a safe district." I'm a big guy and I've lived in nasty spots and even though I have been jumped and knifed, I generally feel safe wherever I go, because I'm taller than 99% of the people in the world and stronger than most, having been a serious weightlifter for a while, so even though I am a wuss I look like a goon.

Anyway tonight as I'm walking back to my hotel's back door I notice a low rider in the parking lot. The driver's door is open and music is pumping out of it. The car is directly between me and where I want to go. The driver, this muscled, tatooed Mexican-looking guy is sitting in the front seat, nodding to the music. Near him, I notice, in the shadows, one or maybe two other muscled, tatooed, Mexican looking guys. I'll confess: my spidey sense did start to go off; I got the first molecules of that old flight or flight response.

Until, that is, I realized what that familiar music was, that tune blaring out of the speaker in the low-rider driver side door: The Carpenters, Karen Carpenter, singing "Yesterday once more", that perfect hymn to nostalgia (it might even be my theme song). And I gave the guy the thumbs up, and he too, along with his friends. "Karen Carpenter," I said. "I love this stuff."

And so now I say to you what I said to those muscle geeks in the parking lot:Buenos noces, amigos.

Yesterday Once More

When I was young
I'd listen to the radio
Waitin' for my favorite songs When they played I'd sing along
It made me smile.

Those were such happy times
And not so long ago
How I wondered where they'd gone
But they're back again
Just like a long lost friend
All the songs I loved so well.

Every Sha-la-la-la
Every Wo-o-wo-o
Still shines
Every shing-a-ling-a-ling
That they're startin' to sing's
So fine.

When they get to the part
Where he's breakin' her heart
It can really make me cry
Just like before
It's yesterday once more.

Lookin' back on how it was
In years gone by
And the good times that I had
Makes today seem rather sad
So much has changed.

It was songs of love that
I would sing to then
And I'd memorize each word
Those old melodies
Still sound so good to me
As they melt the years away.

Every Sha-la-la-la
Every Wo-o-wo-o
Still shines
Every shing-a-ling-a-ling
That they're startin' to sing's
So fine.

All my best memories
Come back clearly to me
Some can even make me cry.
Just like before
It's yesterday once more.

Life. It's a bitch kitty sometime, ain't it?