Now I start the moving, winnowing, choosing, packing. Now it is decided that my father must move-from his spacious retirement village villa to a two-room fraction in Personal Care. When fighting on behalf of the father you love, who do you become? And insist with my questions, until I get the news we must have, so that I can carry it back to my father, who lies in his bed and asks if, perhaps, I can just sit, if, perhaps, I can quiet now and be. And do not don the quarantine gown, the quarantine gloves, the quarantine mask. When there are bills to write, I write the bills when there are calls to make, I make the calls when the therapists and the aides and the nurses are kind, I bring them books, I bring them flowers, I bring them cookies and when something goes wrong and then another thing goes wrong and when, now, no fault of his own, no forgiving this scenario, my father is newly quarantined, I declare, superhero style, To hell with quarantine.

When the meals that are delivered aren’t the meals my father wants, I knock to the front of farmer’s market lines so that I can hurry back to him with something he might like. When they accidentally bring my father someone else’s cure, I am aggressively self-righteous. When it is clear that the wrong pills and the wrong doses have been slipped into the treatment, I am not easily consoled. When they lose my father’s medicines in the days and weeks, then months, to come, I demand emergency provisions. “Hey, Dad,” I say, but he has his hearing aids out and his glasses off and there will be no reading my lips behind the mask that I am wearing. The nurse talks and then my father starts-a helium whiz of words, a steroid high. I am to drop the backpack of books I have been toting around like a turtle shell and adorn myself with nylon, paper, strings. Now there are three long blocks to the hospital and then Reception, elevators, the ICU, where they tell me to stop running. Now the train is bumping along its tracks. Through the cavern of the train station, up to the wind-chucked platform, into the train.

Through the grit of the city, into the grit.

Across the campus, where I’ve been teaching.

Going over by beth kephart