“This place is a mess,” my father said in a stern voice, surprising me as he looked around the room. “Are you going to clean it?” Not sure how to respond, I simply said, “Yes.” He nodded, then strode out of my childhood bedroom on his cane, forgetting that he was elderly, that I had grown up and moved out decades earlier, that he was the one who had made the mess. You can’t go back to the past. But my father’s dementia briefly let me relive a moment from the 1960s, when I was his little girl. — Lisa Braxton