The Door and the Cereal Box[SB1] 

 

One morning as I was heading off to work, I detected a strange odor by the front door.  I didn’t think much of it at the time, but when I came home, the smell hit me again.  Oh good grief, one of the cats peed on the doormat.  What the hell?  And why the hell would they do that?  Was it some emotional feline response to my illness?  Surely they had seen their dad do some pretty wacky things over the past few months, not to mention the endless hours I spent “sleeping.”  How many hours had I gone without feeding them or how many days without changing their litterbox?  It had to be some sort of retaliation for all that, right?

 

Like sifting through a box of cereal to find the free prize, my brain sorted through the crumbs of my memory, reaching into the very depths of my mind and only coming back with cereal dust.  But finally my efforts paid off.  I found the prize that was my truth.  It was me who peed on the doormat. Oh, dear God, it was me!  As I slowly tore open the plastic wrapper to my prize, I remembered peeing during the night.  Well, that was really nothing new.  Even at 40, I was already familiar with the nightly pee routine of a well-aged prostate.  But last night was different.  The memory was faint, even diaphanous, like a watercolor-painted cloud clinging to a mountaintop.  Was it just a dream?  Clearly, it wasn’t.  As apparent as the odor was, it was far less discernable why I had peed on the door!  The door, for God’s sake, the door. 

 

Slowly the dream came back to life, but more in the style of a faded 1920s silent movie. Like thousands of times before, I got up in the middle of the night to relieve my bladder. Only the encephalopathy told me the hallway was the bathroom and the front door was the toilet. I was ashamed for what I had done and for blaming the cats. But I got to cleaning the door and apologizing to the cats. Then I threw the doormat in the trash and cursed the fog in my head.

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 [SB1]Door and cereal box