Johnny Cakes' Evolution

1 – Trouble

My aunt said they used to call him Johnny Cakes when he was little. She said there was something strangely wrong with 'Cakes' being part of any nickname for my dad as he grew up. They dropped the 'Cakes' when he turned into a terror who had to be sent away every summer. He had become a wild boy with very few boundaries.

He terrorized my aunt, chasing her around the dining room table with Grandma's sewing shears. He had been bigger and faster and caught my aunt, giving her a haircut that robbed her of the golden curls of her early childhood. When Grandma heard the screaming, followed by the howls of laughter from my dad, and the grievous shrieking of my aunt, she put down the pots and pans she had been hand-washing in the kitchen. She wrung out the washrag she had been using, and took her leave of the kitchen. My aunt said she had never seen someone put 2 and 2 together as fast as my grandmother. She clocked my aunt's cut hair, the curls lying like dead chipmunks on the floor, and my dad, still brandishing the shears.

My grandmother was a bigger-boned beautiful woman, half-Irish, half-Welsh. She had grown up with five brothers, and she knew how to handle boys-who-were-boys and their antics. She had also been a teacher, and she could out-think and out-maneuver any kid who thought they might possibly have a leg up on her. By the time my dad knew what was happening, she was chasing him around the dining room table, and being bigger and faster, she caught him and whipped his thighs with the washrag. My aunt was scared by the scene and stopped crying. My dad was shocked by the encounter, and being a bully, he refused to cry, but his face reddened just the same as the backs of his legs.

Grandpa had returned from work, and, at first, he was unhappy to have a surprise guest for dinner, until the events of the day had been related to him. In time for dinner, the Boy Scouts Scoutmaster for my dad's school showed up. Grandpa welcomed him, giving him a gentle slap on the back. The Scoutmaster was very excited to have my dad join the troop, and laid out all the details for Scout camp, leaving for 6 weeks the following Wednesday.

Grandma said, "Perfect."

Grandpa said, "Perfect."

My aunt thought, "Perfect."

My dad thought, "Whatever."

The camp experience managed to wear down my dad enough not to feel the need to victimize his younger sister. When he returned before school started in the fall, his older sister said, "Don't challenge Mom and Dad. You'll never win. They are bigger, smarter, and faster, and you're a pretty horrible kid."

2 – The Scout

The second summer my dad was sent away, he wound up on a bus with his Boy Scout troop and another troop, bound for New Mexico. The boys would be on horseback for 4 weeks. The bus ride to and from New Mexico took four days going and three days coming back. The Scoutmasters hadn't counted on the degree of segregation as they traveled southwest and had to modify stops along the way for the second troop that had joined with my dad's troop. They had to maneuver diners, rest stops, water fountains, restaurants. It was during this trip that my dad realized the world wasn't fair, and it wasn't always everyone's oyster.

Dad's New Mexico Scout photo showed around 25 boys, different shapes, sizes, and colors, and they were smiling, every last one, arms around one another. I like to think the photo was taken at the end of the trip, highlighting how they'd been through a rough and tumble, grueling experience together and emerged intact, with maybe the only off-putting thing about them being body odor.

My dad, now withered and wizened, told the stories of his summers away from home with a shining gleam in his eye. He would talk about the trouble he would have gotten into had he stayed home, which may or may not have been true. He became a lifeguard as soon as he could earn his swimming badge and receive all the lifeguard training required in 1950-something. He learned CPR, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, how to turn his clothes into a floatation device if he had to dive into a body of water to rescue someone while wearing street clothes, how to tread water for 15 minutes, how to swim with one hand while dragging someone to safety, and maybe the biggest lesson of all. His summers away taught him how to use his energy for good because he had too much energy for a single boy who had quickly grown into a scrappy teenager, a scrappy teen with a head full of bad ideas.

3 – Birthdays

We gathered for his birthday when he turned 81. His goal had been to make it to 80. "Every day after 80 is a bonus day," he would say.

On his 81st birthday, in toast, I said, "To you, Dad, for this bonus trip around the sun, and for continued health and good fortune for another trip around the great star."

We all laughed. Time was winding down, though. None of us knew how quickly or the tortuous path we and my dad would all be following. The worst part of the trip being the gremlins hiding along the way. He didn't see them, and he couldn't know he had borne them, but they were there nonetheless. The gremlins were stealing our dad who dressed as Santa for the grandkids, the dad who grew sunflowers as big has frying pans, our dad who swam 200 yards every morning through his 50s, 60s, and 70s.

At first, I thought he wasn't listening when he would repeat questions. I didn't give the answer he wanted to hear. My mother didn't speak loudly enough. My sister wasn't explaining things clearly enough.

My sister said something was wrong. I said Dad needed a hearing aid. The television volume was so high. My mother was speaking so much louder. My dad's regular speaking voice had become louder without becoming outright yelling.

One day, my mom said, "I want to prepare you for what's ahead. It's not time, but the time is coming."

"Okay," I said, praying the discussion was going in any direction but the one I feared—because it was fear of the monsters and false realities our own minds created.

"I was devastated the first time I knew my mother didn't recognize me," Mom's voice was shaking, but held the force that she knew this was something she needed to share. "It will happen with your father. I don't know when, but it will happen, and you will feel despair and grief. This person who you love who has loved you since you were just a tiny, bewitching girl who held every part of his heart in your infant-sized palm no longer knows you."

Eventually, around Dad's 85th year, the loud talking had become yelling. There were good days, and there were the bad days. On one of the good days, I stayed the night. Mom, Dad, and I sat around the kitchen table, eating some kind of carryout. Mom didn't get joy from cooking for just the two of them, and their dinners had become odds and ends in to-go containers, and their refrigerator was full of Styrofoam and plastic with dates marked in black Sharpie.

As we finished dinner, we began to request classical music on the Amazon Alexa. Dad chose first. New World Symphony. I chose Adagio for Strings. Mom chose Stravinsky's Firebird. We continued to go around and around choosing songs. One of Dad's choices was the 2nd movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata. It was something he had loved for as long as I could remember, and it was something he had asked me to learn on the piano because he wanted to have it played at his funeral. When he chose it that night, I felt the burning behind my eyes, maybe more than the emotion I always felt when I heard Barber's Adagio. Dad didn't say anything when the first few bars began to play, though. The three of us just sat there listening to the song, and I saw the tears running down my mother's face. I saw my dad's eyes, a very clear aquamarine blue, moisten. I didn't know if choosing the sonata was a subtle reminder, or if it was just a song he wanted to hear. I choose to believe he had a hankering for the piece.

My sisters, mom, our kids, and our spouses—we all knew it. Dad knew it. One day he said to me, "My brain isn't right. I say things. I don't remember things." We were at the very top of a downward slide, and none of us knew if it would be a quick or painfully slow descent. And not one of us knew how to strap in for it either.