My dad

My dad comes over every Saturday and... well, I kind of just wish that there was someone here besides the kids to listen to this shit. It's a recap of the same things he's told me every week for the last 5 years, intermixed with horrifyingly personal reminiscence and personal information. This is a very different dad from the one I remember from just a few years ago... no less long-winded, but more scattered and less filtered. I have been getting (and trying to hide from) the feeling that this is the last wind of a man who is on the decline into dementia. He corners me in a room while I clean furiously, and tells me deeply personal stories, stories that often make me uncomfortable, but I can sense that he feels like they are important, and that I am one of the few people... or maybe the only person... he can tell them to. I am, he likes to remind me, his baby girl. His littlest daughter.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than what we used to do on Saturdays, which is argue about politics. He said that I was the spitting image of his mother, Ida Bea, in personality as well as looks, and so Ida Bea is the name he calls me when I'm being obstinate or argumentative or opinionated. My dad used to love to get me riled up, because he said that everyone else is scared of him and I'm the only one who will get in his face and argue. God fucking damn, that man could piss me off. He would come over and almost before he was in the door he would posit some ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY BULLSHIT premise, and I would tear it apart while he defended it and I became increasingly enraged and frustrated, pulling myself as tall as I could and glaring up at this big smug motherfucker in his fucking green beret and yelling "THAT IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!".

Eventually I would defeat him and he would ruffle my hair and say "OK, Ida Bea, you win." After years of this, when he revealed to me that he was just messing with me because he liked that I would argue, I was a combination of angry, proud, and relieved... because it always dismayed me that this man I knew was brilliant (Well, he's also a medic and a chaplain, commander of a ranger base, and has a Master's degree in education) would come to me with arguments that it seemed to me only the mentally defective (such as Tea Partiers) could support. My dad is--or was--a troll. Most of the time I thought he was full of shit until he started taking me to his council meetings and dinners and events, but I realized one night when he left me alone at a table with two generals who laughed at the fact that I bossed my dad and he meekly said "yes, dear" and went to do my bidding... oh. Oh... my dad, Daddy, he is the real deal, even though he's just a sergeant. They said "In all these years I've never seen him take orders from anyone... little girl, you don't know your power!" and they laughed and laughed, making large of it. Years later, another dinner at a table with other generals, and one of them said "You don't really know who your father is, yet". It was a statement, not a question. So I know that in addition to the pages of documents of things that I know, some of which were declassified the year I turned 30 (That's when I found out why he was gone during my infancy, for which my mother never forgave him) there is a great deal more to come. Probably among them things that I don't want to know.

In addition, of course, to the things he tells me that I already don't want to know. I won't go into details but my father's romantic history has more shocking, more tawdry, and more tragic than anything I've ever seen in a movie or read in Henry Miller. Fucking hell, dad.

A year or so ago my dad was convicted of voter fraud. Voter fraud. What the shit, dad? For voting under my dead brother's name and the name of my missing-presumed-dead uncle (allegedly a mercenary; also allegedly a crossdressing burlesque performer who, in his youth, went by the stage name of "April"). Local news and a random "debunking" website latched onto the story and attempted to debunk my father's military record, accusing him of fraud based on the inconsistency of his stories with public military records. During the trial I learned two things; one, that my father has been diagnosed with Alzheimers, and two, which the judge said while looking me straight in the eye, that my father's military record is exactly what he has claimed, and more. The judge said in court, on record, that my father is a bona-fide hero. So, while I know he has also been a wily old bastard, and fuck-all knows what kinds of schemes he's planned up and what I have yet to learn, I also know that all the crazy tales he has told me are true. That he has taken part in incredible, historical POW rescues. That he is a remarkable, and honorable, man.

He talks a lot, recently, about how everyone will come out of the woodwork when he dies, looking for a slice of the pie. They don't know that there is no pie, that he has put all of his properties into other people's names, that there is no inheritance to be had there. That his inheritance is the act of having put up with him over the years, his trolling and stories and bigness and loudness and sharp, sharp eyes. That his inheritance is him putting his big brown hand on my head and saying, "OK, Ida Bea".