have a very fond Friday night memory. My grandmother—my father’s mother—was somewhat of a grand dame, who lived in a building at 500 Avenue Road. It was a luxury apartment that had been built by my father’s cousin, Kenny Rotenberg.

After Friday night dinner, my dad and I would drive his mother home. There was something magical and quiet about those drives. Then in her later years, as my grandmother was ailing from Alzheimer’s disease, the drives from our home stopped, replaced instead by drives with my dad to 500 Avenue Road, when he would insist I wait in the car, while he, the dutiful oldest son, would go to visit.

My father is now 85 years old. He was born in downtown Toronto and has lived downtown his whole life. A few weeks ago he wisely moved into a retirement home.

Now, I know we all think our parents are smart…well, the other day I told my 14-year-old son that his Grandpa Cyril—my dad—had not only gone to high school at University of Toronto School but skipped two grades and was a fully qualified doctor by the time he was 23 years old. My dad became a top radiologist. (As a kind of neat, DJC-like East-end aside, he was the first Jewish doctor to be the head of a department at the East General Hospital.)

As a kid I was amazed at how he could remember the names of all the bones in the body. As I grew older I’d run into people who’d interned or worked with my dad and they all said the same thing: they had never seen anyone who could read an x-ray so fast. The man had an extraordinary memory.

“Had.” These days that seems to be the operative word. The gears are slipping. The conversations are often repetitive, sometimes confused. It is hard to watch.

The very first day after my dad moved into the retirement home, he got lost.

He was driving to his tennis club for his Monday morning game. When he didn’t show up, we got the call. You can imagine my terror wondering where my father was, trying desperately to find him.

Thankfully, just as we were about to phone the police, we got a second call. Lost and disoriented in the city he knew so well, my father had driven back to 500 Avenue Road, where his cousin Kenny still lived. He was okay.

Twenty minutes later, when I got out of the cab at my grandmother’s old apartment building, I knew that I’d be taking my father’s car keys for good, and I knew that his last drive had been to his own mother’s home.

And it struck me that my father’s short-term memory may have failed him, but a deeper memory had led him home to safety.

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