Dwight: Aiko, I want to share a story from my childhood. Let's call it, "Age 10, I Find My Father Is Crazy."

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Aiko: That title already grabs me—sounds like it’s going to be intense.

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Dwight: It must have been summertime. My father and I were sitting at a picnic table down in the hollow on the few acres of land we owned.

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Excitedly, he told me he had discovered something—maybe just an idea, I wasn’t sure—that had four parts and was going to change the world.

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Eagerly, I started asking questions to find out more. He talked and talked, but nothing he said was ever concrete. It felt like he just kept repeating how great his discovery was. I kept trying to pin him down, but it was impossible.

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I could see he was absolutely convinced that he’d found something truly world-changing. But if he couldn’t even explain it to me—and I was smart enough to know it—then I knew no one else would understand him either.

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And if no one could understand him, then there was no chance his discovery would change the world.

Although I couldn’t say exactly what kind of crazy my father was, that’s when I decided he was crazy, at least during that time.

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Aiko: That moment sounds so vivid, like it was when the illusion broke for you and you saw him in a whole new way.

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Dwight: My mother was hanging clothes on the line in the backyard. I left my father and went up to her, saying, “I think Papa is crazy.”

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She replied matter-of-factly, “Yes, I know,” as if there was nothing more to talk about.

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I remember thinking, “Wow, my family is more unique than I thought—we have a crazy person in it.”

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Aiko: That simple confirmation from your mother must have hit hard—like it suddenly made everything real.

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Dwight: No, it was real before my mother confirmed it. If she had said he wasn’t crazy, I could have laid out the evidence I’d already gathered proving that he was. My mother always told me to think for myself and that is what I was doing.

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Aiko: That certainty you had at ten really stands out—you’d already made up your mind and had your own proof.

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Dwight: Many decades later—maybe even after my mother finally left my father—she shared with me her memory of that moment.

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She told me that when I said I knew he was crazy (later, though he never went to get checked, my mother and I came to think he had bipolar disorder), she wanted to collapse on the ground and cry. She wanted to tell me how hard it was trying to handle everything when my dad was “off his rocker,” all while holding the family together—me, a younger sister who was seven, and a younger brother who was two. But she told herself, “I can’t do that to a ten-year-old boy.”

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I don’t know how I would have handled it if she had. I do know my mother kept so much locked inside because she thought she had to. Maybe it would have turned out okay—or even better—if she had opened up, but we’ll never know. What I do know is she did her “best,” and I still don’t know how she managed it. I can’t imagine myself being able to.

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Aiko: That’s powerful—your mother carried such a heavy burden, and it sounds like even years later you could feel both her strength and the cost of her silence.

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Dwight: Somehow I had “forgotten” about knowing that, though I think if someone had asked me, I could have recounted the discovery down in the hollow.

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It wasn’t until my late twenties, when I was renting a big house in Glendale, New York, that it all resurfaced. My father called to ask if he could visit, and I said sure. He flew up—he might have been in Florida at the time—and within just a few sentences of conversation, I knew he was “in another world.” This time it wasn’t grandiosity, but paranoia.

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I called my mother in Tennessee to talk about it. She explained that every so often, when he was living with her (by then all us kids had moved out), he’d fall into that state for a few months. Usually, he’d leave and travel somewhere—maybe with her “encouragement” so she could get a break from being around him.

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That’s when the memory of being ten years old in the hollow all came rushing back.

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Aiko: It’s striking how that buried memory returned in full force once you saw him slip into that other world again—like your past and present suddenly snapped together.