His truest life has involved, not any one philosophy, but a day’s headlong listlike physical activities. My father can announce his admiration for thirty-year-guarantee roofing-shingles and with a passion that lets you participate, then marvel. What a great idea, shingles! Were bird feathers or gator scales mankind’s first shingle inspiration? He is a literalist, which makes him—if heard correctly—a metaphysician. But Dad, of course, would argue against this. Too fancy. Too much my idea, too fey, Ivy, and “brainy sounding.”

He is accustomed to giving orders factually and then he’s used to pretty much getting his way. But a major general’s role depends, of course, upon his being correct most of the time. Or at least some of it. Now, Dad can’t catch his breath; and what’s worse, he cannot hold a memory. He could never tolerate sloth in others; he always drove himself so hard. Bad luck was something weaker people chose. Dad seems shocked at all he’s lost a grip on. Fact is, he forgets he forgets.

Poor guy keeps exposing himself to ridicule because he can’t quite believe a brain as good as his might fail him (and his followers) and in ways so public. But instead of retreating, instead of letting my always-subtler Mom take charge, Daddy creates daily showdowns for his own mind, forcing it. (Forcing: His solution in business, childrearing and, for all I know, sex.) But his mind now balks. From his own mind. Just as I and my brothers forever balked. From our sire’s direct orders.

Whenever proved wrong again, the old man blinks around, seeking someone else to blame. For minor infractions, he once beat his sons, each in turn, using his own doubled cowhide belt; now, while I, stooped, prepare to again audition as his yardboy—a job I failed for eighteen straight years—I picture him, whipping it, using the belt, it curled like a grey tabbycat on one of those white couches—whipping his own brain.

He studies me hard; he wears sunglasses, long sleeves, a planter’s hat. Its floppy brim means to block a sun that’s given him—thanks to golf and bright Florida and Nordic ancestry—nine skin cancers. “But the good kind,” he likes to say. Amazing what we all can get used to.

As a kid, I grew so klutzy under this man’s critical and freezing glare. But, today, following orders, I do not hurt myself. For once, I’ve not even dropped the tool yet. Helping him, I understand that every time he has looked out at this lake, Dad has seen only the one spreading raggedy-ass palm, spiting him, so needing a man’s taming discipline.

He now calls which dry fronds must go, “Not that, lower, yeah. More like it.” As he becomes excited over work finally visibly achieved, his voice does not grow easier—but cross, more the distant monarch’s. “Forget that one. I already told you.”