One fine day.

I’m not sure if this post is about wildflowers or about my dad. But somewhere in this weird, wonderful day, my heart began to dance.

I sprang him, finally, today.

How many weeks has it been since the retirement village closed the doors up tight to the usual guests? Dad, who in normal times is on a not-very-secret mission to crack the code and escape from Memory Care, is fit to be tied. And I am slowly dying from not seeing my parents, except through a glass, darkly.

Like Dad waiting for a guest to leave the door unguarded, I saw my chance today. A pain in his side and a lesion on his face got me past the firewall of protection around doctors’ offices, and I scored an in-person visit for Dad with a doctor. We giggled behind our masks as we drove away from DRV, feeling euphoric and a little wicked.

“Lay down on my table,” the doctor said after Dad gave the usual spiel of his weight history, beginning with 152 when he was playing football in high school.

Dad examined the table carefully. “Which way?” he asked, and I snorted beneath my mask.

The doctor chuckled: “Well, your humor is intact!”

Determined to make the most of this day, I talked him into a nearby new favorite hiking spot after the doctor visit. For once Dad didn’t outpace me. Except perhaps in social repartee, as he warmly greeted Every Single Person we met on the trail. “I’m 92, you know,” he proudly crowed from behind his multi-colored mask.

(I know he’s really 91, but would YOU want to burst your dad’s tenuous happiness?)

Basket Slough is always gorgeous, but I was astounded at the new crop of wildflowers since my hike there a week ago. I kept deviating from the path to take their portrait, while Dad plodded stalwartly to the lookout, and then outdistanced me on the way back down.

A young dad passed us, trying to keep up with the children running pell-mell down the hill before him. “You just passed up a 92-year old man!” my dad hollered after him.

When we arrived at the car I asked if we could do one more thing: “Dairy Queen? Dip cones?”

“Only if I can pay,” he said. “Do you think $20 will be enough?” Feeling like a man, Dad fished some bills out of his pocket.

“...Well, what’s this?” And he held up a Pakistani roupee! Somehow that roupee had stuck with him through sailing home from Pakistan on the ship, raising four children, marrying them off, 9 grandchildren and 11.8 great-grands, and moving into Memory Care—around 54 years, best I can figure. He can’t find his driver’s license and sometimes doesn’t know my name, but somehow this roupee is in his pocket. He wants to give it to me.

“Dad, if you still have that roupee after all these years, you’d better keep it! I’ll just lose it,” I say, and we pull over to eat our dip cones in the DQ parking lot.

“Was your cone as big as mine?” he asks. Several times. It was bliss, sitting there, licking the drips together.

“I’m not going to be able to eat my supper,” Dad confesses.

“It’s okay,” I reassure as I retie his mask and fasten his seatbelt. “Sometimes you just need a little celebration.”

The aide was waiting for us at the front door when I took him home. “Do you think we could talk to her about how to get out the door? Sometimes I hurry and try to see what code they punch in....”

I drove home with a grin on my face and happy tears in my eyes. All is right in my weird, wonderful world.