Being and nothingness...

Anybody remember the movie "All of Me"? Lily Tomlin plays a dying rich woman who wants a holy man to move her soul into a younger, healthier female body, but it accidentally gets stuck in Steve Martin. I haven't seen it in years, but as a kid it was one of my favorites, & I still think one of Martin's best (along with "Roxane").

Anyway! If like me you've seen it more than once, you may remember the scene where the holy man thinks that flushing the toilet makes the telephone ring.

So tonight I left Dad in the car for a few minutes while I ran upstairs to get Loopy.* When we returned, he told us that a man had come and started up the motorcycle next to the car, and that had apparently caused our car's radio to go on. "It played for a minute or so, then it just stopped," he said, waving his hand at the radio as if half-expecting it to go on again.

This was intriguing, until some investigation revealed that the music came not from the radio but from my cell phone, produced not by the motorcycle but by an incoming call.**

So, you see, losing your mind can be entertaining.

I'm getting sleepy, but maybe Loopy will tell you more about our fun with Dad and his remaining marbles—for example, how he has literally forgotten the existence of tamales (shoot me immediately if that every happens to me), which he's eaten hundreds of times, and is convinced that there's something mysterious wrong with his watch (because it's five minutes slow and the date has been one day off for a couple months (perhaps since April 30???)....I offered to solve these problems by turning the little knob on the side of the watch, but he won't let me touch it.

Then again, when I muttered that Aunt Florence's phone number seemed to have changed, he replied immediately, "Oh, it's the same number, they just have a new area code—it's 408 now." Yup, that's exactly right. Visions of Rain Man and the toothpicks, anyone?

He's also really funny at times, on purpose I mean. At the funeral, a friend who'd had knee surgery, in response to my query on the subject, said, "Well, I still feel it—I know where my knees are all the time, anyway!" To which Dad immediately replied, deadpan, "I know where my knees are all the time, too." Friend was not amused, but I was.

There's more like that. Maybe Loopy can fill you in. I have GOT to sleep!!!

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*It was late afternoon and the temperature had dropped to a more bearable 101, so even though he insisted on cutting the engine and opening the windows, I hoped he'd be okay if I hurried.

**To be precise, a Bollywood tune called "Kata kata laga," which according to a random google, is "the latest raunchy remix by DJ Doll" and "the hottest Hindi pop song hitting the radio stations in Fiji [?!] and across the world." More importantly, perhaps, when did I stop finding "ringtones" unbearably irritating, and start thinking they were cute? Was this a mistake?