What a Goose Can See

My father lived with us for a while at the end of his sojourn in this dimension. He was blind and contended with some rather odd memory puzzles. He would come to the kitchen for coffee, bacon and eggs of a morning and exclaim that he was like a goose, waking up in a new world everyday. And indeed, he had "forgotten" during the night that he couldn't see.

One morning, late in his game, he came sans "walking stick" out of his room with a misplaced spring in his step. He was supposed to have died several months, even a couple of years, earlier and seemed actually to be finally giving in. We had been knocked off our feet a few times over the past weeks with not a few surprising and alarming episodes--dementia, acute memory malfunction, hallucinations.

But this morning, he fairly waltzed into the kitchen re-affirming that we had made a good decision to move to this new place we were in. Never mind that we had been there for several years, already.

"Penny, this is not a bad little place, now, is it?" His back-hand way of saying he highly approved. "I think I'll go outside and have a look around."

I hovered, because by this time he could not see two steps in front of him, but he didn't know that. He walked through the doorway into the living room and saw a wide, happy yard where the kids could romp and cavort like little prairie dogs. He raised his feet and stepped over small logs or down the porch steps, approving of our new home.

Carefully, like you would with a sleep walker, I guided him back to his seat at the table where he peppered and over-salted his runny fried eggs and slurped piping hot, black (actually, it was amber-colored--our attempt to curb his caffeine intake) coffee with a certain well-earned satisfaction and contentment. The day wore on, got more and more "hazy" for him, and eventually, there we were, back in Kansas.

That was several years ago, but when I remember that morning, I remember the new place we had moved to. I remember that wide, happy yard, those logs and bushes, the broad porch, right there in my living room, and I was happy seeing through a blind man's eyes.