Free I Still Have It. . . I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It by Rita Rudner Page B

contained thirty tubes of toothpaste intermingled with forty tubes of antifungal cream. My dad was a hoardaholic.
    My father loved the apartment we had rented for him. It was a perfect situation. We lived in the building next door, so we could be there if he needed us, and we could also pretend we were away.
    I became his professional grocery shopper, which was how I discovered how much he was drinking. His first shopping list included four gallons of Zinfandel, three bottles of scotch, ten boxes of Kleenex, a dozen bottles of rubbing alcohol, and a request for more antifungal cream.
    “What about food?” I asked.
    “I packed that in the boxes.”
    I broke the news to him that although I had been tempted to sell his canned goods on eBay under the heading “antique food,” his carefully packed groceries were now living happily with their friends in the garbage dump.
    Attempting to change a diet that obviously had consisted of rusty juices and rotten beans for at least a decade was quite a challenge. I included TV dinners, fruits, and vegetables in his first grocery delivery and introduced him to the microwave.
    The first time he attempted to use the microwave, instead of entering nine minutes he mistakenly entered ninety. The explosion broke the seal of the microwave and a brown gooey mixture ran down the front of the cabinetry. That Salisbury steak TV dinner left a stain that will still be there long after all of us are gone.
    His drinking represented another issue. His reasoning made sense. He was eighty-two. He didn’t drive, he didn’t work, he didn’t have to be anywhere at any given time, and he liked to sleep. What was wrong with drinking scotch in the morning? It was positively healthy! He used it to down his vitamin pills. A glass of wine with his lunch didn’t sound all that unreasonable until you factored in that lunch occurred at ten o’clock and the wineglass was a ten-ounce tumbler.
    Still, the relocation had been a success. Dad took daily walks during the couple of hours in the afternoon when he was sober, and our then-one-and-a-half-year-old daughter loved to visit him in the next building. She even got him to play a game she invented, called Hats. She noticed some baseball caps on his coffee table and with baby sign language demanded we put them on our heads and rotate them when she yelled “hat.”
    I noticed my father limping slightly on one of his walks, and when I asked him about it he complained that something was “sticking in his foot.” Back up at his apartment I found myself in shock when I saw what was going on at the base of his body. This man who carefully applied antifungal cream to his toes every single day had not cut his toenails in years. My father had Howard Hughes’s feet.
    “What’s going on? Why don’t you cut your toenails?” I asked.
    “Can’t see down there.”
    “How are you applying the antifungal cream?”
    “Badly, but I have to do it. You get athlete’s foot, it’s with you for life.”
    “You’ve lived alone for almost thirty years. Who are you going to get athlete’s foot from? Mice?”
    “You never know. Some of these germs are airborne.”
    I decided not to argue with a man who even in his youth had made very little sense. Not only was I his personal grocery shopper, but now I was also his pedicurist.
    All was going relatively smoothly until my father’s diet caught up with him. One morning during our daily phone call I asked him, “How’re you doing?” and he replied that his stomach wasn’t “so hot.”
    I rushed over to find him leaning back on the couch, his face a shade of statue gray.
    “Just wait a couple hours. I’ll be OK,” he mumbled.
    I hadn’t listened to him when I was a teenager and I didn’t listen to him then. I called an ambulance.
    Acute diverticulitis was the least of his problems. Once his condition was stabilized, an X-ray revealed an aneurysm in his aorta that was poised to burst. The doctors recommended an operation