Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD as it is called is a mental circus act that causes a person to irrationally focus on a particular function or object. Another of its forms is where a person returns to an action, the same action over and over, expecting a different outcome each time.
This type of behavior frequently strikes more intelligent people because the coping mechanisms necessary to support such illogically complex actions requires a fairly nimble mind and it is, therefore, not surprising that my dad (father #2) had a hell of a time with this issue. In subtle ways I’m a captive of the same confinement but my dad’s creations were the stuff of textbooks on the subject.
We laugh when this disorder is played out on television because, when it’s someone else’s problem, it tends to be a whole lot funnier, like the character Robert Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond who compulsively touches his chin with his eating utensil before the food reaches his mouth. It’s a running comedy bit but it reflects reality well which is probably why it’s so funny.
My dad, while he lived with us, would invariably ask the following question each and every night at the dinner table after getting a little heartburn: “Do you think there’s something wrong with my heart?”. My mother would dutifully say no like she was a licensed cardiologist but even she could easily see the difference between a heart attack and reflux.
The fact that he knew she wasn’t qualified to make the call medically did not stop him from asking and he would expand on that to include the question: “Do you think I have cancer?” Well, considering he smoked Camel straights with abandon, the question was almost reasonable but this was the oblivious smoking ’50’s and society still hadn’t faced slowly emerging medical facts so it still boiled down to a ritual need to ask the question.
My dad was, obviously, a very fearful person and his OCD ran to making sure there were no disasters in his home even though his very life was a disaster of sorts. Nevertheless, he didn’t want anything to happen in the area of leaving the stove on when going out and so there was a ritual to prevent that from happening. After their divorce, I would go over to his house and watch the preventative stove ritual in person.
First he would touch each knob one at a time and with each touch would repeat “off, off, off, off, off, off” until every knob had been confirmed off and then begin the process again, touching the knobs one at a time and repeating his little mantra. “Off, off…” You might think that twice through the checkout would convince one that the knobs were off and it was safe to leave the house but for my dad that was only as good as getting just about to the front door and then…better check the stove again.
Touch, “off”, touch, “off”, touch, “off” until he made sure that one of the knobs hadn’t pulled a fast one and turned itself on between checkups just to put the house in danger. Every time I went over to visit him he did that song and dance, even if he was just going into another room. At a young age I found it mildly entertaining but a bit baffling too. At the time they didn’t have a name for what he was doing.
There was also a ritual surrounding his nightly inebriation that had a perfectly timed curve to it, beginning with his simple sober self, who was the person I would meet at the door and proceeding throughout the evening to its inevitable conclusion. This curve was also dependent upon the time of week because I think there were other considerations if it was a Sunday versus a work day like Wednesday.
For illustrative purposes, the Sunday version would involve me coming over and watching the football game with him around 1pm and the menu was nothing more than television, soda pop and Spanish peanuts (which was one of his edible passions). We would watch the Detroit Lions lose another one and then move to the kitchen table where the first can of Stroh’s beer would be introduced at approximately 4:15pm.
We would toss around some small talk and then the second can would go off at approximately 4:45pm and the pattern would repeat itself at half-hour to 45 minute intervals for the duration of my visit. That meant that the target amount of 12 cans (or a half case in beer drinker lingo) would be gone a short while after I was gone home.
My mother told me recently of a ritual that only she could know of but it fell perfectly in line with the others. Every evening at bedtime he would go into the bathroom, wash his hands, come out and kneel at the bed and say his prayers, whereby he would go back into the bathroom and wash his hands once more. He did this, my mother pointed out, whether he was drunk or sober and since he was drunk nearly every night, it was true dedication to the ritual. Hand washing is one of the classic OCD rituals and he had neatly combined it with his bedtime prayers. I would theorize that the second trip to the bathroom was sort of an off-handed apology to God for saying his prayers while smashed.
When he died of a heart attack in 1973 I grieved but remembering those nights at the dinner table with “Do you think it’s my heart?” made me laugh a little because now the answer was, “Ya, I pretty much think it’s your heart…”