The Bobby Brain Ride

Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2015/01 - Winter

I spent Thanksgiving in North Carolina with friends and their 80-something patriarch, Bobby, who was in rare form.

While tryptophan in turkey is supposed to have a mellowing effect, it wired Bobby. He couldn’t stop talking. Worse yet, when you tried to converse with him, you’d have to repeat yourself with increasing volume ad infinitum. He couldn’t hear a stick of dynamite if it blew up in his boxers.

Bobby’s daughter is the first to admit her daddy Is a piece of work. Except for the recent hearing deficiency, Bobby is the same 4’10”, 100 pound, adorable, engaging, insatiably curious rascal he has always been. And talking to him is a trip I have dubbed The Bobby Brain Ride.

The tour is dizzying, launched with a headlong plunge into La La Land, a valley of oddball, misconscrewed (sic) information relating to physics, genetics, and random movie star trivia. And no matter how authoritative your responses to his questions, he will still ask, “Do you know that for sure or are you just making it up?”

His first query: “If we have say, 500 genes we pass on to our children, how many of those do they get? 400?”

“What?” I said as I fastened my seatbelt for I was rumbling around in his La La Land railcar banging into bytes of data that had rolled about enough to felt into a giant thought hairball. I didn’t know how to untangle enough of his question to even begin an answer. Luckily, he saw a shiny object and moved on.

But it didn’t take long for him to find me again and ask, “Why don’t we go flying off the earth if it is spinning so fast?”

I explained the mass of the earth was so great, blah blah, and he said, “You’re making that up!” I Googled it and showed him that my answer was on target.

The conversation rambled on, our bumper cars colliding with the likes of Jerry Steinfield (Seinfeld), Lafayette (Queen Latifah), and Henrietta Jones (Catherine Zeta Jones). Bobby does not have dementia (or demetria, as he calls it). His tangled-up words and incessant questioning are a lifelong condition, which

has never held him back. If anything, pseudo-demetria has elevated him to Endearing Eccentric Character status amongst friends and acquaintances. Still, 12 hours of Bobby-isms is exhausting.

When he finally left, and we disembarked the Bobby ride, Bobby’s kin and I flopped on the couch and stared at each other like glassy-eyed taxiderms. Thought-hairballs blew across the carpet like tumbleweeds. My girlfriend uttered a Thanksgiving prayer that, patriarchal love aside, she’s grateful she fell short of inheriting 400 of her daddy’s genes.