Long before ‘Breakfast with the Works’ at Keeneland, my Father would take me out to the track on early Saturday mornings to watch the horses work out. We would head out from the South Lexington suburbs well before the sun was up; the city still asleep and dreaming. Pre-dawn has half of the fun for me. The quiet hours felt like our own little secret. Dad and I would share quiet conversations blanketed by the magic of morning. He with his coffee while I sipped hot chocolate. The grounds at Keeneland began stirring long before sun up. Horsemen would be bustling about the track, focused on the business of winning races. Even at such a young age, I was somehow aware that champions were made on those frigid mornings when the stands were empty. No one to watch, no one to cheer. Just a horse and his exercise rider. Just a father and his little boy.
My older brother was in from Colorado recently, and we decided to take Dad back out for a Saturday morning visit. With our eldest brother by our sides, it was a magical moment to be standing track side with the three men that shaped my world entire. The atmosphere of the morning workouts has changed over the past 30 years. The whole affair has been somewhat commercialized, but that didn’t bother us. We’ve been around long enough now to be shocked by change. Perhaps most of all that morning I noticed the changes in the boys that were now men, and the Father who now struggled just to make the walk from the parking lot to the track.
At 83, Dad has nearly lost all of his short term memory. He has been spared his long term memory; and even his wit and intelligence. I’m thankful for that – but the loss of short term memory is a brutal struggle that has proven to be way more complicated than I had ever imagined (if I ever really imagined it at all). Dad is operating in a nearly constant state of suspicion and at times, panic. He knows something is amiss. He’s reasoned out that it has something to do with his mind. But that’s about where he stops connecting the dots. As an engineer, he’s taken to a quad ruled notebook with meticulous notes to try and extricate himself from the issue. But in the end, dementia wins the battle. The notes scribbled down only become confusing or at best a less-than-exhaustive itinerary of what is happening around him. The facts might be there, but the context remains elusive.
As a result, Dad is only a glimpse of Dad. He is a little less easy going, and a little more on edge. Not combative, but certainly not at ease. His colleagues used to call him ‘Island Joe’, because we seemed to saunter down the hallways of IBM as if headed to a game of shuffleboard in a small coastal town. But dementia changes all of that. The easy going disposition is now preoccupied, wondering if he’s repeating his own questions or re-telling the same story. It’s an unsettling paranoia that pervades every waking moment of his life. It’s a new reality and it is, in a word, cruel.
I knew that this particular morning at the track would be our last visit to Keeneland. Dad is unsteady on his feet. Leaving his home into unfamiliar territory is disconcerting for him. If I’m honest, I knew that the whole idea of this trip was more for me than it was for him. So as I battled the temptation to feel guilty about it all, I soaked in the conversations about track conditions, late fading horses, and the jittery mares that were being taken out for the first time. I closed my eyes and felt the cold air on my cheeks. Smelled the unmistakable smell of the trackside. And listened to that voice. The voice that has loved me, corrected me, encouraged me, and soothed me since boyhood. The voice that pierced the vacuum of silent mornings when I was a child, warming up my hot chocolate with a splash of his own hot coffee. It is the voice of home.
Published in the Herald Leader