Dr. Diet: Notes From the Shrine, 8.12.2025

Dateline Shrine. Dad looked out of it when I got here, this slim version of him. Two hundred pounds, maybe.

“Do you want to go outside?” I asked him.

“What’s outside?” he replied.

It’s the same thing he said to me the other day. I wheeled him out of Dammert, through the break room, and down the long hallway to St. Francis and the exit there. But first we stopped to get a soda.

“You want a Diet Coke?” I asked him. “Diet Dr. Pepper?”

“I’ll take somethin‘,” he replied.

We sat down at the chairs and tables outside St. Francis.

“How’d you guys know where to go this mornin’?” he asked me.

“Huh?”

“How’d you guys know where to go?”

“Who’s ‘you guys’?”

“Anybody who’s going over there,” he said.

There is some sort of event going on at the Retirement Community today, maybe that’s what he was talking about. It might be Mary Crowe’s visitation.

He takes his first sip of the Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar.

“Oh, man,” he says.

He can still relish a soda. Seventy-five cents from the vending machine in the break room. He had a roll of quarters in one of his drawers in the house, quarters wrapped in plastic, from the bank. It’d been in there for years. One day a few months ago I saw it in there and I knew what I would do with those quarters.

“I can wheel you around if you want,” I offer.

“What do you mean, ‘Wheel me around’? Do you recognize where you are, somewhere down there?”

A guy walks past us, having parked out in the gravel parking lot a moment earlier. He works in food service. I think his name is Allan. He’s an OG.

“Who is that guy?”

“He works here.”

It’s just so good to hear my dad asking some questions again. Maybe he is better in the morning, with a soda. 10:01. In the trees above and around us come the sounds of a cardinal, a dove, a nuthatch.

“You know what month it is?” I ask him.

No answer. Then, “Watson…Watson.”

Or maybe Weston.

“Is that what you’re saying, Weston?”

“Sort of.”

He seemed to be looking at something, off a little ways in the distance.

“What do you see?” I asked him.

“I just wondered what….” he started to say, then, “Listen to those tanks over there.”

He’s hearing the noises from down the hill, across the tracks, just on the other side of 157. There’s a pallet factory down there. They make wooden pallets. There are sometimes heavy machines dozing around, running on treads. I suppose they might sound like tanks.

“There’s a little factory down there,” I tell him. “They put together wooden pallets. Is that what you’re hearing?”

“Well, sort of,” he says.

He takes another sip of the Dr. Diet. He had a reaction when I called it that, “Dr. Diet.” That’s what he used to call it. When he heard the phrase he made that reaction he used to make, where he kind of scrunches up his face, and jerks his head back a little.

“I don’t know what they got back behind, down there. Old wooden pallets. I guess they own ’em,” he says.

“You want more soda?” I ask him. I take the can and pour small amounts into a small plastic cup, refilling as needed.

“Not yet,” he says. “What was it, that spigot down there?”

I think he’s referring to a culvert, a drain pipe coming out of the ground a little ways away. There is a bit of a breeze on this typical stodgy August morning in Belleville, Illinois. The relative humidity drops about one percent every five minutes if there is a decent breeze going.

A car drives by, the driver waves.

“Who was that?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Just some guy.”

The driver goes to the dead end just past the St. Francis entrance/exit and turns around, pulling up along the sidewalk in front of us, presumably getting ready to pick someone up.

“He’s trying to get a feel for it,” says my dad.

He’s interested. I can see him taking a close look at the license plate holder/frame.

“Auffenberg,” he says.

We lock eyes.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

I haven’t heard this much from him in months!

Joy-El walks out, says, “Good morning, Brian.”

Then she says hello to me.

“She knew who I was,” he says.

Then he asks me what the soda’s being poured out of. He is intently watching this guy who is here to pick up his mother.

“He’s trying to get a feel for where we are,” he says. The guy waves at us.

“He waved!” my dad says.

“What?”

“He waved!”

“To you?”

He nods.

“He said hello to Brian and John,” he says. “Who’s that now?”

“Who’s who?”

“Brian and John.”

“That’s us.”

10:22. His eyes are unusually active. The shuttle goes by.

“What is it?”

“The shuttle.”

“Those little trees,” he says.

“What trees?”

“Old trees.”

The shuttle is collecting residents to go for an outing.

“Don’t be scared, Brian,” says Joy-El, “You don’t have to ride with us.”

The Bat Car is on the move. A St. Francis resident own it. It’s always out in the gravel lot, same place. An old Chevy. It has a yellow bat bumper sticker, bat like the flying mammal.

Now another car comes by.

“Who’s that car?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Somebody else. Busy out here today.

Joy-El is driving the shuttle, Ann is riding shotgun. She waves as they pull away, my dad waves back.

The chair my dad is in, the hospice lounger is called a Broda. Broda, bardo, broad, board. Walk a broad board to the bardo. A bearded bard bared bread. Bednar, Bader.

I get my dad’s chair moving, I will take him for a spin, around down the corner, to the courtyard and back.

“Going for a walk?” asks a St. Francis resident. The woman who is perhaps of some Pacific Islander descent.

“I’m goin’ back home,” says my dad. “I been over in Dammert.”

“Oh, I see,” she says.

She’s out by the St. Francis entrance a lot, one of the most common to enjoy the outside. Her and the tall bald fellow who now is using a new, souped-up sort of walker. I think his name is Walter or Rupert, something like that. He has a deep, slow voice, always unfurling a generous, “Helloooo.” Her, Walter, and a guy named Jack are a pretty common sight out here. Not the Dammert Jack. This Jack can still walk just fine but I have heard he is a wanderer. He was smack dab in the middle of the road outside the main entrance as I was getting in here, or trying to, earlier this morning.

We stop off in some shade. It’s not bad at all right now. It’s not hot, not sticky like it was last Friday. I want to stay out here as long as possible before lunch but the only thing gnawing at me is that hospice CNAs might be arriving soon, might be here already, to give him a sponge bath. I don’t want to hold them up. He could enjoy the bath.

So I will take him in. For now we will say goodbye to the whirring of the annual cicadas, and the pallet factory sounds.

Back at Dammert, I hear from Karin who has checked on his current weight. He’s at 198. I get the stock market channel going. He seems to be following the ticker. No sign of the hospice CNAs. I don’t usually see them here before lunch. So my move will be to get here on the earlier side, today’s traffic on I-44 through Fenton notwithstanding.