Though Dad often cannot hear me shouting to him across the living room, he manages to hear the key turn the dead bolt, and before I have finished latching and locking the door, he is calling out to me, so cheerfully, “Rog! Welcome home, Roger!  It’s good to have you home!”  I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, but I’m pretty good at the light going on and showing me patterns and changes.  Dad has always welcomed me pleasantly home, but his greetings have cheered and lengthened noticeable almost three years into this caregiving experience.  And it is just like me to worry about the cause, and the meaning.  Might he be sensing the nearing of his end, and be making an extra effort to be kind and close and grateful?  Or is that just my mild paranoia?  On a Saturday morning, ratchet set in hand, I set about checking all the stair lift bolts for tightness; the bolts securing the brackets to the lift structure were tight, but the bolts anchoring the same brackets to the stairs were appallingly loose, and the sound of my ratchet doubling them down reached Dad’s ears.  What reached my ears was his worried complaint, “I hope he doesn’t break the lift.”  Poor Mom walked into the trap as she tottered over to me and reported, “Your dad wants you to know he’s worried you’re going to break the lift,” and I barked back at her, “I don’t care.  I know exactly what I’m doing.”  In tears she returned to Dad and ordered him to shut up, reminding him that I was a “big boy” and knew exactly what I was doing.  Of course, I soon apologized to her for barking at her, gnashing at the guileless messenger.  She smiled and teared and invited me to bark at her anytime I pleased (sweet thing), to which I retorted, “Never!  You deserve better.”  During dinner I explained to Dad what I had done to the lift, and he smiled weakly and seemed unconcerned, and he thanked me for dinner: “Roger, we are so lucky to have you make us such beautiful, delicious food for our dinners.”  All smoothed over, I guess.  My New Jersey friend Bruce was his mother’s caregiver for the better part of a decade, running up the stairs at her beckoning or at the slightest unusual sound.  He knows the life of sleeping with one eye and one ear open for anything out of the ordinary that might signal a need or a fall or a crisis or…  My eyes feel particularly tired this evening, and I think I’ll shut them early, though part of me will be on the alert until Mom and Dad are safely in their bed after midnight.  I am not a skilled caregiver, but I do live here with them and do cook and clean and fix and answer to their needful beckonings as best I can, and enjoy being welcomed home by my old mom and dad: “I’m sure glad you’re home, Roger.”