flowers

The drugs worked. My father did sleep for two weeks. At the end of that time he went out to his garden and began weeding and mulching and planting and trimming and coddling his flowers. That summer they made the best show I’d ever seen. He spent four months on his knees out there every day until it got dark. He just needed to know he could nurture something.

He was sick for about a year. But the worst was over in a couple of months. I don’t know what other drugs Dr. Sontag put him on. After awhile he was drug free. It took another two years to divest himself from his fund and all his internecine financial dealings.

He learned a lot about mood disorders in that time. He got out of Wall Street. He still made money. But he found other, safer ways to do it. And he stopped investing for the likes of the Rothschilds and The Bank of England, which is really the Queen, and a lot of other big mucky mucks in America. He always had big dreams.

Sometimes you get lucky and your dreams coincide with a market that’s on the rise. You may hit it just right and get out just right. But more often you crash and burn. Then you’re lucky to get out making a bit more than you had when you went in. My father did okay over the long haul. But the big score eluded him. Maybe it was always a fantasy tied to the mood disorder.

“He had this once before.” My mother had alluded to this before.

“What do you mean?”

“He got sick in the Marine Corps. They called it battle fatigue. But it was really the same thing. He just got sick. Couldn’t take it.”

As if she would have been able to face a steamy jungle full of snipers aiming at her from God knows where every morning.

“I don’t think this is the same thing.”

“Oh yes it is. He’s always making me out to be the sick one. But he’s the one too.”