When confronted, Dad denied it, but we knew it was him. On their own, the bananas might have been amusing. Like a surrealist art project. But they were part of a more troubling pattern.
He had started acting strange in other ways, too: making jokes that no one could understand and forgetting things, like where he'd parked or the name of the owner of the diner where he'd been a regular for years.
He took to spending large parts of each day sitting in his car in the driveway, poring over the newspaper, circling seemingly random words and scribbling notes that said things like Welcome to the information age and There's only one way to find out!
He was agitated all the time. Both listless and restless. He would wander from room to room as though he was looking for something. Or else he'd sit and stare blankly at some point in the middle distance, disappearing into himself for whole afternoons.
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