If you came to the house up the shared driveway, across the “bridge” built over the precarious back steps through the back porch to the kitchen, you would invariably face Dad’s back at the end of the kitchen table. Most waking hours he sat there, clothed in his food-stained green winter coat against a chill only he could feel, fork poised over a banquet of plastic containers filled with items formerly known as food in various states of decay. If he heard you come in, he might turn around and greet you. But he also might not.

The kitchen table was Dad’s “office.” It groaned with all the precious tools of his life—food, newspapers, piles of junk mail, his pill box and several bottles of pills rubberbanded together, the telephone, TV remote and, at increasingly rare intervals, his wife. Without having to rise all the way out of his chair he could reach the refrigerator, cupboards, microwave, and back door to let the cat in or out.

He had satellites in other rooms—the dining room table was a favorite, and the cleaning of it for holiday dinners could take days (the bulk of the time spent nagging him to get to it). Upstairs, downstairs, attic, cellar—all had some of Dad’s “files” in piles, boxes, grocery bags and wrinkled old bread bags.

Food had risen to the status of obsession: the arranging, heating up, combining and eventually eating, spoon by spoon, consumed most of his waking hours. He could taste almost none of it, however, and added to it whatever seasoning he could find, from hot pepper to mounds of salt. Since he also couldn’t taste (or smell) mold, rot or any other indicator of spoilage, he ignored it, and only once that we know of got food poisoning. He would fight to the death for his leftovers, no matter what color they were. And leftovers were all he would eat. If, in the time I was living there, I cooked a “nice” meal, he would refuse to sit down with Mom and me, insisting he would eat it later, when it was left over.

His attitude toward food was entirely consistent with his life plan—that of arresting the passage of time. He did this in two ways—first by writing down every minute of his day in a small notebook he kept with him at all times. We all called it a diary, but it was much more than that. It was a record of every activity every minute of the 24-hour period, waking or sleeping. The recording of his day had become an occupation that superseded all but the most urgent activities, and provided an excuse for not participating in any activities he didn’t choose. “I’m busy,” he would say. When prompted to put it away and live, he would respond that the more one interrupted him, the longer it would take.

So careful was he of his “records” that I once found the piece of paper he had recorded the labor pains attendant to all three of our births. Four years apart, on one piece of paper.

When he returned from driving anywhere, he would sit in the car, noting down all the activities of the trip. Sometimes, if it was dark, he would fall asleep in the car in the garage, pen poised over the notebook, and no one would know he had returned. Often, he forgot to turn the dome light off when he did wake up, and Mom would find a dead battery in the morning.

The other way he thought to ensure his immortality was the creation of a “family history.” As a historical record, a family history can be of great value, after 100 years or so. In these days of e-mail and long-distance phone calls, who knows what it would include. Dad’s idea of a family history was permission to save virtually everything that came into the house. He began a futile task of trying to categorize and file all the snippets of paper the family had collected over 50 years, from school records to greeting cards to grocery receipts, junk mail and magazines. He even managed to convince the county historian to house his valuable collection, sight unseen, of course, and even spent some time there, cataloging it.

Eventually his ennui conquered even this project, and no more boxes were carried out of the house until it was finally cleaned out for its sale, and then most of his precious “files” went into the dumpster parked in the back yard.