My dad is a crotchety old man. He's always been one, ever since I can remember. And I've known him since he was 39 or so.

Last night I stayed at my parents' house to watch LOST with my mom. Better to stay, since I had to get up at 4:45am to get ready for work. (Yeah, I know. Save it.)

Crash. Eleven PM. I leapt up from the couch, and my mom got out of bed. We got to my dad's room at the same time, to find him hugging his large bedside lamp. We laughed, but then we got to work setting the lamp back on the table, helping Dad get up to go pee, and settling ourselves back into our respective sleeping quarters.

Crash. One-ten AM. Same scene. My mom took away the lamp. Today a church friend of hers (a Sister in The Truth, she might say, in a pious moment) was out shopping and called my mom to say she'd found just the thing. My dad now has a too-heavy-to-tip lamp that is activated by touching any part of the lamp aside from the shade. No more fiddling with the twisty parts or the clicker parts or the oversized living room lamp that seemed to want to dance with him frequently during the night.

Back up to this last Monday. My mother called me in the morning to say Dad had fallen in the shower. Turns out he fell to the ground, taking the brunt of the fall in his lumbar region, which hit the shower door tracks. He denied hitting his head, but his later crankiness told us he probably had. He has been agitated since. Easily frustrated and prone to bellow. Yes, even more than usual.

My mom had woken up with a severe muscle spasm in her trapezius, from her shoulder blades up into her neck, and couldn't even reach to get a bowl out of the cupboard. I drove to her house and prepared lunch for my dad, giving him chili and bread and the insulin my mom hadn't been able to draw up earlier. His right arm had a scrape from his wrist to his elbow, from the fall in the shower, which I bandaged with Kerlix and triple-antibiotic ointment. Thanks, Ol' Salt (aka Francis) for the First Aid class; I remembered.

A few hours later I went back to take my dad to the eye doctor. I found him in the shower (my mom was home, yes, but I went in to check on him when he called for her), the shower chair covered in feces, as was his butt. He didn't realize I could see him. He was on his hands and knees, doing who knows what, I think maybe trying to pick up a nail file from the shower floor. It was pitiful. He wouldn't accept help from me. He called again for my mom. She tried to coach him through his shower. He somehow got his underwear on by himself, then came out to the bed, where he let me dress him the rest of the way.

The trip to the doctor wasn't remarkable. I told Dad there was soon going to come a time when he would have to let me do some of the personal care tasks. I think my phrasing was more like, "Dad, you know, you're gonna have to let me clean your dirty butt."

He scowled and said, "Oh, I can do it, and if I need help, your mom can help me." I told him that really she couldn't so much anymore, coming up on 70 and also being half his size (really!). He mumbled something and then didn't mention it until later, when we were waiting for the ophthalmologist. He leaned to me, and said, in a surprisingly appropriate whisper, "Well, if you're gonna be helping me, we'll have to buy you a box of gloves."

That statement means much more than "we'll have to buy you a box of gloves." It means "in this moment, I can admit that I'm getting old," and "I guess I don't have any choice but to let you see me naked," and "you might actually be right, daughter that I wish wasn't so damn smart or pragmatic," and "this is a hell of a note" (his father used that one a lot).

I'm going to pick out railings and a raised toilet seat. His doctor should be happy to write the order for them, so that Medicare will pay.

There's a lot more to the saga of Roy, and of going to the eye doctor, but this is about as far as I can go tonight.