I AM PIZZA RAT - HAN ONG

At the San Mateo Community Center, a sign tacked up at the end of the hallway says "If you're here for FALLING, NATURALLY you've walked too far. Go back. It's the middle door." On closer inspection, the comma turns out to be some schmutz or stray ink.

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The young Filipino instructor allows me and another nonstudent, Bun (pronounced "Boon"), an African nurse, to observe. We sit away from the participants, at the back of the basketball court that has been commandeered for Falling Naturally. Mats cover a large section of the floor, and the centerpiece is an obstacle course made of hard foam. The color scheme is schoolyard-not a pleasure on the eyes. Bun's charge is the friendly white guy with the belly and the tonsure. Mine is my father, and we are both old men: he is seventy-six, and I turned fifty-one a few months ago. Among the reasons that I sit in on this class and on his doctors' visits is to see what could happen to my own body in the not too distant future. Also: Is there anything I can do to prevent it? In other words, I am trying for a different demise. I am my father's only child. My mother has been dead going on thirty years-whatever future ailments await me may have more to do with her than with my father.

That I came back to San Mateo temporarily to live in my childhood home and help care for my father, and that I have not agonized about it-this was a surprise. And that my father had a plan-not only would he pay the rent on my New York City apartment, which I would keep, but he would give me a thousand dollars a month, plus let me use his well-maintained Datsun-was another, greater surprise. I wonder, though: Will I sell the house after my father passes and make a renewed stab at my life as a writer in New York, or will I stay on in San Mateo? That I am considering the latter is a sign of how congenial life here has turned out to be.