Lift the vales of darkness in which you choose to hide

Further stuff about my father. He spent about as long in the hospital as we expected, but he was released to a physical therapy clinic on Tuesday in a process which would have been a lot simpler had we known he was going to be released Tuesday. Then I could have driven up to fetch him; instead, we ended up with a confused procession where my sister brought him down to the house (to fetch clothes) and then took him back up to a new clinic. More on that later.

I think you'll enjoy this bit from when my sister, brother, and I visited him Sunday, for its inherent value and for its sketching of character within my family. (My sister-in-law and niece were busy playing a Godzilla video game.) (And had also seen him daily over the week anyway, and if you think it's easy to take a four-year-old out somewhere every day for a week you're crazy.) While our mother was off somewhere my father said to us --- again --- that all he really wanted was for us to buy a new mattress, a nice firm Tempur-Pedic mattress, since the one they have in the master bedroom is a decade old and agonizingly uncomfortable. Of course, what he really wants is a mattress like the first one he and my mother ever had, from a Perth Amboy mattress company now defunct but which was hand-assembled by little old Polish ladies and was the most comfortable thing ever.

My brother asked if my father had ever tried out a Tempur-Pedic mattress. He admitted he had not. Had he tried a Tempur-Pedic pillow at least? Because, apparently, they get hot. Oh, yes, our mother bought him a Tempur-Pedic pillow which he hated because it was too firm and way too hot. So, now, this implied maybe not getting a Tempur-Pedic mattress after all. He conceded maybe he was thinking of another mattress, but we should get him one, and don't tell our mother.

While riding back home, when my brother asked our mother about the agony of the mattress, my mother said he'd never said anything about being uncomfortable on the mattress. She had me confirm to her that he'd been talking about this, with me, over and over. And I said that I hadn't done anything about it because I figured no secret mattress purchase would ever meet her approval, so there wasn't the need to do anything or even mention it. She went on to observe that he had a Tempur-Pedic pillow which he never used. Also, that yes, the first mattress they had as a couple was hand-assembled by little Polish ladies for a Perth Amboy mattress company, and it was the most horribly uncomfortable thing ever.

We have not as yet committed to any mattress purchases.

Trivia: The terminal moraine marking where the Wisconsin Glacier reached at its greatest extent, in New Jersey, ran roughly from Perth Amboy to Summit to Morristown, and northwest to Dover, Hackettstown, and Belvidere. Source: New Jersey: America's Main Road, John T Cunningham. (The book is from 1966, second edition 1976, so it's quite possible geological thought has changed since then. I'd double-check with Wikipedia, but, you know, forces of evil on the move and all that.)

Currently Reading: The Origin Of Species, Charles Darwin. And this wraps up the collection of ``books I always meant to read but never got around to'' which had been sitting in my Strategic Reading Reserve! Which would also have been exhausted now except that I got a bunch of books between Christmas and a rare chance to visit the used book store near work. Still. It's progress. It's rather more spryly written than I had imagined to expect from a mid-Victorian-era gentleman writing 400 pages of what he claimed was an abstract to the more substantial real work he planned to get to.