Fortune of Reversal

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

“Why do you answer the phone like that?”

It’s not the first time I’ve asked Fred, my grandfather — in truth, my step-grandfather, but I never knew his predecessor, so I’ve bestowed the designation on him — this question, and I keep asking it because he fails to supply an answer, a fact that may not be altogether shocking coming from a man I’ve yet to figure out. I’ve just called him to confirm that I’ll be by on Sunday to chat for a half hour prior to the Super Bowl, a game we will watch together for the twenty-fourth time, the day itself one the man has long professed is his favorite on the calendar.

I don’t remember when I began referring to him as derF — much like redrum, it’s simply his name in reverse, not to imply that he tortured his wife and son in an abandoned midwestern hotel (joke’s on you because he doesn’t have any children) — but everyone who knows him well enough and has heard the nickname grasps exactly what it means. Fred is the most diehard New England Patriots fan I know. He was a season ticketholder for a decade when the team stunk, attending eight home games per year with his friend Kenny, the two of them proceeding to get inebriated by drinking cans of Coors in the parking lot before sitting on bleacher seats watching games they largely forgot, partially on purpose due to the team’s aforementioned lack of success. He quit renewing his season tickets when Kenny died in the early ’90s, the tradition, much like his friend, gone and buried. Now, when his team does something great, he sits with his arms folded across his chest and exuberantly laughs at the athletic absurdity while saying, “Can…youuu…be-lieve…that?” as if a wide receiver making a gravity-defying catch is the height of human achievement. He’s fond of asking me, “What do you think, Addy?” in anticipation of a big third-down play, trusting I will recognize if it’s a running or passing formation.

Fred’s excitement to watch the game with me is palpable, and so I focus like I’m studying a cinematic masterpiece, intensely analyzing plays with him. Year after year, Fred will inexplicably inquire about which commercials I’m hoping to see, a question that blows my mind because derF mutes the television during commercials while watching literally anything else, including all other football games. He will propose the idea of drinking beer (I haven’t consumed alcohol in five years, a fact he knows) and question if I’m rooting for the Patriots (a team I’ve hated my entire life, a fact he also knows). The man cannot cease from surprising me despite my awareness that misdirection and confusion are his superpowers.

derF grew up an only child in a rural town, lived with his parents until his fifties when he met my grandmother via a personal ad in the newspaper, and adored doing yardwork more than any other activity. I’ve witnessed him scornfully view a misbehaving leaf as it evacuates a tree limb while he eats his lunch and makes a mental note, going outside immediately after his final bite to locate the fallen petal and deposit the detritus in the woods at the edge of his property. derF has been caught licking his fingertip like it’s a mop, pressing his moist skin on linoleum floor lint and tucking it in his shirt pocket to dispose of later while ignoring the trashcan beside him. He will re-use dental floss for days, go to the bathroom in his home with a flashlight as his sole source of illumination, and wash his dirt-covered hands with a couple drops of water and a suggestion of soap, soiling towel after towel despite my grandmother’s rage. He cannot cook nor use a microwave, facts that became hysterically evident when my grandmother went on a vacation without him years ago, the hopeless yet content man consuming an entire panful of lasagna ice cold night by night for dinner, ignoring the detailed instructions she’d left taped to the aluminum foil. He used to love driving to the cineplex to take naps during movies. He is casually racist despite having a black best friend, one time regarding the treadmill in my mother’s basement as an “iron nigger,” which he defended by saying it was big, black, and useless. He will help you with anything, but he must first “study” the scenario, and you may become a victim to his lack of studiousness, his desire to help occasionally stronger than his success rate, like when he attached a paper clip to a washer anchored to twine he twirled and prodded in turbid water while failing to unclog a sink. He will be sarcastic but never, ever reveal when he’s doing it unless you directly question him multiple times, and even then, there’s a lingering sense of mystery afterward, as if his confession meant he was lying. He is not a defiant contrarian, but he will consistently zag if you request that he zig. Fred is derF.

Less than a year ago, my grandparents finally moved to a retirement community, one that prevents my grandmother from cleaning (her longtime favorite activity, the staff handles all of it now, although Constance’s frailty is part of her inability these days) and means derF has no outdoor chores to do. As she suffers from dementia, Fred battles treatable lung cancer, an illness that doesn’t prevent him from bringing his spouse downstairs for flower arranging classes and bingo games so she can continue partaking in the activities she enjoys. They’ve admitted how they’re waiting for their time to run out — “Don’t get old, kid!” is the phrase Fred has said to me more than any other (along with “We’ll see you people sometime,” his parting line so familiar that it was parodied past the point of being funny last century)— both of them mostly bored and routinely confused as modern technology scares them off from advancing with the world. They do, however, tend to become more alert when company visits, the stimulus a jolt to their minimized humanity.

While my grandmother’s abilities are much dimmer — she’ll say at least once per quarter how Fred took her, not Kenny, to one Pats game against the Bills years ago — derF reverts to behaving like the football fiend I’ve known since childhood, the bifurcated part of that behavior marked by his general obfuscation, like when he purposely waits to go to the bathroom right as a big play occurs, slamming the toilet seat so violently that it startles me each time, my grandmother shrugging and swatting her hand in the air, the aural assault old hat. Many times, derF has begun reading a newspaper article during an onside kick or field goal attempt. I’ve insisted to myself in these moments that I won’t return, that he doesn’t really care, but then I realize that he doesn’t know how else to be, that his serenity is extemporaneous. “Fred, you invited me over to watch this game, not watch you read the fucking paper!” I’ll shout, the disillusioned man immediately folding the Hartford Courant and saying there’s no news in it anyway. If the Patriots win, he’ll smile, say it’s a long time till next season, and turn off the television. If they lose, he’ll frown (which looks an awful lot like his smile), say he didn’t have any money on the game, and turn off the television. The result matters except maybe it doesn’t.

My most memorable Super Bowl moment was not attending the 2013 iteration of the game in New Orleans, a game where I saw Destiny’s Child reunite and sat through a power outage, but calling Fred prior to my milelong walk to the Superdome. I worked on site for StubHub that week, and upon receiving a ticket as the game kicked off, I spoke with Fred while wiping away tears of joy. He was thrilled for me, as human and grandfatherly a moment as I’ve ever shared with the man, and it made not watching the game together remarkably special aware that he was more exhilarated without me in the sun room’s other recliner as he tried to perceive my vantage point from the lower level endzone corner while eating extra pizza slices on my behalf. That phone call, along with candidly telling him he needed to want to move to his current retirement facility (and not commit to it because other people shamed him into believing it was the right thing to do), stand out as the two realest moments I’ve had with the man.

I don’t know how many more Super Bowls I’ll watch with derF, but I do know I won’t be able to watch the game in new company without thinking of how it probably doubled as his least favorite day of the year, because the second it ended he knew he’d have to wait a year for another one, mentioning the upcoming season to me from March through August whenever I called or saw him. I will try to calculate how much of the game he missed while instead distracting himself by reminiscing about the time he cut his lawn with scissors or ate raw bacon due to his hatred of the smell when it was cooked, choices I must assume he implemented to source pleasure, the latter a word that seems foreign when accompanying his name. Until he’s gone, he will refrain from revealing himself, and as someone who finds such a personality trait intractable yet deeply admirable, I will praise his elusiveness when defending him to others still lodging the same complaints I’ve issued for decades. No matter how the upcoming game ends, derF will be unphased and enigmatic. In a world where revealing everything about oneself has become commonplace, derF would be the guy on social media posting photos like the ones he used to take, out of focus with no sense of composition, the tops of people’s heads lost to the hyaline sky. His perspective is not like yours or even like mine. In fact, Fred may choose not to have any point of view most of the time, a rare exception being that on his favorite day of the year, it isn’t the football game that’s important, but simply that his faux grandson watch it with him since it’s one situation where doing the opposite would have zero value for a man as contradictory as derF.