The Unexpected
Caring for my father with Parkinson's has revealed unexpected bonds. His laugh lingers, and I miss him more than I ever imagined.
Every morning I kneel down and put a compression sock on my father's leg.
Every afternoon I take it off.
He is 75. He has Parkinson's. He came to live with us after my mother died of breast cancer in 2020, and in the years since, his body has been slowly renegotiating its terms. But his mind is mostly his. His laugh is entirely his. And on the days I travel for work, I miss him in a way I didn't anticipate — a quiet, specific absence that sits in the house.
We make things together in the workshop. He builds epoxy resin cutting boards and wood displays now, working with his hands around what his hands will let him do. He writes religious books and I help him with them. We talk every day about everything — faith, the news, the grandchildren, whatever surfaces. I thought, after this many years, I knew the shape of him.
Then one evening I came home frustrated. Difficult customer. The kind of day that leaves a residue. I shared a little of it with him — not looking for answers, just opening a door.
And my father walked through it with a story I had never heard.
He was in Las Vegas. An amateur poker competition — around 200 players. He plays recreationally, nothing serious, but he's good enough that he worked his way through the field over the course of a day until it was just him and one other man.
The other man wouldn't quit.
There's a moment in a long competition where you can feel the shape of it — the hour getting late, the momentum clear, the reasonable thing being to split the pot and call it a good day. My father read that moment. The other man refused it. Wouldn't split. Wouldn't yield. Kept playing.
And something hardened in my father.
He went aggressive. Deliberately, systematically aggressive — not reckless, but surgical. He started playing to end the man. Chip by chip, hand by hand, he pressed the advantage until the other player finally understood what was happening and by then it was too late. My father took everything. Around $2,000. But the money wasn't the point. The memory was the point.
He told me this story the way you tell something you've been carrying for a while — not with regret exactly, but with the quiet satisfaction of a man who knows himself and isn't embarrassed by what he found there.
I sat with that for a moment.
I knew my father played poker. I didn't know that man was in there — that competitive fire, that capacity for cold precision when someone pushed him past a certain line. It didn't contradict anything I knew about him. It completed something.
This is what I keep learning about the people closest to me: I have mistaken familiarity for knowledge. I know his routines. I know his faith. I know how he takes his coffee. I know the sound of him moving through the house in the morning. But I had reduced him, without meaning to, to the version of him I could see from where I was standing.
He is more than that. He has always been more than that.
And he told me — not at random, not out of nowhere. He told me because I had opened a door. I shared something small and true about my day, and he heard in it an echo of his own experience and reached back across decades to hand me something he'd never handed me before. He was still parenting me. In the oldest, quietest way a father can: let me show you who I am, so you know something about who you can be.
We talk about curiosity as though it belongs to strangers. As though the interesting people, the surprising ones, the ones who contain depths we haven't mapped — as though they're out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered in airports and coffee shops and chance encounters.
But the most unexpected person in my life right now lives in my basement.
He lets me help him with his sock every morning. We make things together with our hands. And every so often, if I open a door, he walks through it with something that reshapes what I thought I knew.
That is not a small thing. That is, I think, one of the great gifts of staying curious about the people you love — refusing to let the familiar become a ceiling. Letting them keep being more than you've catalogued.
My mother has been gone since 2020. There are stories she took with her that I will never hear. That knowledge lives in me now as a kind of urgency — not grief exactly, though grief is part of it — but a reminder that the people in front of me are not finished revealing themselves. Not until they are.
So I kneel down every morning. I put on the sock. And I try to remember that I am touching the leg of a man I am still, after all these years, in the process of meeting.