「故事·听力」My Dad Was Losing His Mind And I Didn't Notice
My Dad Was Losing His Mind And I Didn't Notice
Hello, everybody! My name is Liam and I'm 16 years old. It's no secret how hard it is to deal with your family sometimes. But we all seem to forget that nothing lasts forever. And I am not exactly a special case.
My family is really small now - it's just my father and I. I lost my mom couple of years ago. My dad was a writer. And like any artistic type, he was a little bit weird. Many people would say he was aggressively old-fashioned. He never accepted any modern technologies, like phones, computers, the internet and he didn't have the slightest idea how to use them. He also typed his stories on a typewriter! When my mother was alive, she managed to keep my dad's weirdness under control. She loved my father to bits and I couldn't understand why. I was always so ashamed of him and his strange ideas and behavior. And I never read his stories, because I was almost sure that they would sound crazy. And after my mother passed away, everything got really crazy.
My dad was broken and miserable. He didn't know how to live his life without my mother. He was absolutely helpless! Our life has turned into complete chaos. I would always find dirty or broken dishes on the floor, piles of garbage, an open fridge, or a tap that he left on, when I got home from school. This stuff was not just annoying to clean up, it was becoming really dangerous. I talked to my dad a million times, telling him that he had to find a normal job and be around normal people, and besides we had to eat, but he would always say: "I have written an amazing story! We'll make it this time! You have my word!" But it never happened. You see, my father was not really successful as a writer, and my mother had to work for two to manage our family and never complained about it.
One day, I came back from school and saw a crowd of people and a fire truck near our house. My father was nervously running back and forth yelling at the firefighters. It turned out that he had left the stove on, and the neighbors smelled the smoke and called the fire department. Fortunately, there was not much damage, but we didn't have a stove anymore. This was the final straw. I was so angry with my dad that I finally gave him a piece of my mind. I said he was acting like a baby and it was about time that he grow up. I put him in front of the computer and we started looking for a job for him. There were not many options though, because my dad had no skills, besides typing on a typewriter. It was a nightmare. He kept failing one interview after another, but every time he would give me that guilty look and say: "I am so sorry, son. I will try again." I was in despair.
One evening he came back home the happiest I've ever seen him. He said he had gotten a job at the library. It was finally a success! But it was over before I had even managed to breathe a sigh of relief. I remember my dad sitting in the armchair, being out of his mind with anger and telling me that he just wanted to put all the books in the right order, because it was a shame to keep books like that. Oh, and he also argued with his boss after he was told he had no right to do that without permission. My dad just looked at me, expecting me to stand up for him, but I didn't even let him finish. I didn't say a word and just left to go to my room.
As the weeks went by, I started noticing that my father was becoming more and more strange. He would come into the kitchen and stand there all confused trying to remember what he had gotten up to do or ask me the same question over and over again. He wore dirty clothes and his hair grew really long, but he never combed it. Once I found my dad completely lost in our neighborhood on my way back home from school. He was shivering and when I went up to him, he got scared, like he didn't recognize me, and asked: "Where is Haley? Where is my wife?"
That was the moment when I realized there was something absolutely wrong with him. I got really worried. I tried to make him go to the doctor, but he totally refused to go unless he was on his deathbed. As there was nobody who could help us, so I had to call my aunt, my father's sister. They were not on good terms with each other since she never thought highly of my dad. But that was my only option. When she arrived at our house she was shocked to find her brother in the condition he was in. She shoved him into her car and we went to the clinic immediately. My father took some test and it didn't take the doctor long to deliver the tragic news to us - he was in the early stage of Alzheimer's.
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