Shrinking Days

“The days are shrinking,” my dad says one morning when I visit him, and he doesn’t mean the shortening days of fall.

He bends over his bad knee coaxing on a shoe.

“It takes so much time for us to live,” he says, “that I’m losing time to research.”

And he’s right. Just living sucks hours from his day. Buttoning a shirt, answering a doorbell, climbing the stairs, opening a jar of peanut butter—all this takes double the time, maybe triple.

Even answering the phone—“Pardon me, could you say that again?” Or reading a page, sometimes holding one eye shut to read the fine print.

When he was young, he didn’t fill pill boxes once a week or go to doctor’s appointments for his heart and gall bladder and joints and ears. He didn’t elevate and ice his knee. He didn’t check on my mom multiple times a day. And he didn’t need a two-hour nap to clear his brain.

My dad isn’t complaining. That’s not his way. He’s just detailing life as it is in old age, as if telling me what to expect.

Shoes on, my dad reaches for his cane. He hobbles out of the kitchen, through the dining room and living room, and climbs the stairs to his office, leading with his good leg on each step. I hear his computer make its booting-up noises. And I imagine his internal sigh. Having temporarily subdued all the ever-expanding banal demands, he’s now free to do his real work.

But in the short drive between his house and mine, I think again. For most of his life, my dad has written papers and sermons and poetry and songs. But he’s also changed diapers and shoveled manure and washed dishes and stayed up late helping his kids write papers.

My dad wasn’t born with patience. But accepting the things of everyday life, the mundane tasks of each decade, has helped him master patience. So, at ninety-one, he’s a good sport about encroaching physical demands. And he appreciates that counting out my mom’s pills and tucking her in each night is part of his real work.

Part, but not all.

After she’s safely in bed, he once again makes his laborious way through the house and up the stairs where his mind moves unimpeded back through the centuries and across lands and oceans.

And if these moments are harder to find, they are also more precious.