I have a family second home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in Wellfleet. For those who don’t know, Wellfleet is located on the Outer Cape, which is north of the Upper Cape, which is mostly southwest of the Lower Cape, which sits farthest east into Nantucket Sound. To get to the Upper Cape from the Lower Cape you have to drive through Mid-Cape. Cutting across the Upper Cape is the Cape Cod Canal and its two bridges leading to the mainland (off-Cape) which, if you drive north for another 45 minutes, will get you parallel to the top of the outer Cape and Provincetown across Cape Cod Bay.1
Our house sits on the western side of the Cape, protected from the harshest weather by Wellfleet Harbor and the curve of the Cape itself. The house abuts Audubon wildlife sanctuary land. The main rooms in our house look out over the water, and huge marsh tides change the landscape from blue-green ocean to mucky-but-walkable marshland twice a day. The ongoing slideshow outside our sliding glass doors displays dolphins and hawks, terrapin turtles, brilliantly-colored finches, foxes, gulls, chippies, and horseshoe crab dinosaurs. From our deck or our cozy perch inside we see summer sunshine, white cap winter gales, hurricanes, and hip-high icebergs washed ashore; the glow of sunrise, and dramatic, fireball sunsets. Here I have sat with my father, year after year, trying not to kill him.
It’s not that I don’t love my father. I do. It’s just that he kind of needs killing a few times a day.
This has always been true, but the reasons for it have changed over time. Now, at 92, much of his killiness comes from his argumentative nature combined with his refusal to wear hearing aids. Much, but not all.
He also has a certain haughtiness when being completely wrong that is endearing to people not his daughter, I’m told, but that triggers an unconscious throttling gesture in my hands that sometimes finds me choking the life out of an innocent iPhone or kitchen towel.
“Marjie, this dog doesn’t even know her name. I thought you were a trainer. Watch this: Wendy! Come here! See? She’s ignoring me.”
“Dad, her name’s Nellie.”
“Nellie, Wendy, it doesn’t matter. She still doesn’t know her name. Come here Nellie. Come here Wendy. See? No difference.”
The dog, meanwhile, will have been lying next to him on the couch the entire time looking at me with some sort of enigmatic victory side-eye.
Which she was doing last night when my father said to me, “How old is Wendy? Is she my age?”
“She’s your age. But I recently sent in a DNA swab to have her age tested.”
“Why would you do that?”
“To… find out her age?”
“Why does she need to be AIDS tested?”
It’s not his fault he’s lost a lot of his hearing. It is his fault that he won’t wear his hearing aids. This means I have to scream everything at least twice, usually three times, and that he’s annoyed at me for “not being clear” when I say something. It also means he misses out on hearing things he cares about, like music. My father loves classical music.
At my suggestion, he bought a pair of Apple Airpod Max headphones, with their incredible spatial audio, deep ear cups and noise-canceling capability. Together we set them up on his phone, and selected Bach’s Suite #3 in D Major from Apple music. The crystal clarity of the symphony brought an “ahhhhh” smile to his face, and he leaned back into the couch cushion, the piece playing in his ears, the ocean dancing outside the plate glass windows. I turned to my laptop and started working until, after a few minutes, my concentration was broken by the voices of MSNBC commentators. Then they became louder. I looked up to see him, headphones still on, pointing the remote at the TV, turning up the volume. I tapped him on the arm.
“What are you doing?”
He shook his head at me, pointing to his headphones. I pulled an earphone away from his head (but did not let go and snap it, Your Honor).
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to hear the news.”
“With the noise-canceling headphones on?”
“Yes. I can still hear the TV. I thought they were noise-canceling.” So unimpressed.
“But I mean, you’ve got closed captions on. You could just read the captions if you wanted to know what’s going on while listening to music. You don’t need any volume at all. Or you could read the news on your iPad. Also, the TV volume is on fifty-seven. You remember I’m sitting right here?”
“I can’t hear you.”
His heart’s not that good, I thought at the time. Maybe if they found him there with the phone in one hand, the remote in the other, the headphones on, they’d think there’d been some sort of technological short circuit arc or something…
Logic is literally my father’s thing. A mathematician and engineer, he was one of the principal designers of Apollo’s guidance system. His idea of a “fantastic book” is the kind that drops unsuspecting people into comas if they try to read the entire title in one go.
“Why does she need to be AIDS tested?”
“No, dad, age tested.”
“Well, I heard AIDS tested.”
“But I said age tested. You literally just asked me how old she was.”
“But I heard AIDS tested.”
“Dad, why would I get a beagle AIDS tested?”
“That’s what I wanted to know. I’m not the one getting her tested.”
Morning Teastisms
It is possible to overdo the spicy factor in a cup of chai, but I haven’t reached it yet. I have, though, let out a “whoop” noise at that first sip on a cold morning when the heat of the drink and the heat of the spices crash up against the cold of the ocean air I can’t help but walk out into for just a minute, in socks, when I’m on the Cape.
There isn’t much activity in Wellfleet at sunrise, especially in the winter. The commercial oyster people are still working, but not within earshot of my deck. Most year-rounders who aren’t working on the water are either still sleeping or are getting ready for their day via the main road a mile away. It’s usually just me and the gulls toasting the morning.
For more information on Cape Cod and a shining example of sesquipedalian reporting, see this Wikipedia masterpiece.
Adventures in hearing and paying attention. I know the frustration but do get a kick out his weird interpretations of what he thinks he heard. Thank you for the morning laugh .
ANOTHER ONE TO LOVE!!!!