I tend to visit my father’s nursing home in the late afternoon.

That’s when parking is most readily available. There are almost never any free parking spots on weekday mornings and I’ve given up trying at those times, but there’s almost always something open in the later afternoons.

It probably skews my experience of his condition. In the mornings, I’m told that he’s more likely to be out of bed and in the common room there on the third floor, watching television or sitting at the end of the “men’s table” near the door that opens to the hallway, looking at picture books or simply watching the staff and other patients come and go.

When I get upstairs in the afternoon, he’s most often asleep, and I’ve had to learn that there’s sleep, and then there’s sleep.

A light sleep, no problem. He senses movement near his bed and his eyes open, he looks around, sees me, and there’s quick recognition. He welcomes me by name and we’re good to go.

Deep sleep, though, is a different story. Sometimes he appears to be actively dreaming, eyes fluttering, a foot moving, hands in motion, acting out a scene from memory.

Pulling him out of this kind of sleep isn’t as easy or as pleasant. His eyes open slowly, and there’s more than surprise in his expression. I think there’s fear and bewilderment, as if he’s being awakened in a totally foreign place in which he finds nothing remotely familiar and without a clue about where it is or how he got there. He never says, “Where am I?” or “What’s going on?” but that’s what his eyes are shouting.

Sometimes on these days I’ll just let him sleep. It’s easier for me, and may be for him as well.

On several recent visits, relatively good days all, he opens his eyes, says hello, and then looks at the clock on the opposite wall. The routine is the same each time.

He reads the time.

“Four thirty”, he might say, correctly reading the hands, his voice low and rough, his mouth still full of sleep. He looks at me, then back to the clock.

“A.M. or P.M.?”

The first time I heard the question, I responded facetiously. “Well, 4 a.m. is a little early for me to visit.” He looked at me blankly.

So now I stick to the obvious.

“P.M.” I reply, the afternoon sun streaming in the window behind me, a vertical strip of sunlight hitting his face whenever I shift in my seat and brush against the curtain.

Each time he learns that it’s late afternoon, he’s genuinely upset. He shakes his head, as if he can’t believe the news.

Then he looks up at me.

“I’ve got to get organized,” he says, voice determined. “I’m not getting anything done.” He puts an emphasis on the last word, angry with himself for failing to take charge of the time.

Getting things done has always been important to him, working 12-hour days when he was in business and continuing even after he retired in 1998 at age 85. He mowed the lawn of their large 11,000 square foot Kahala yard well into his 90s, raked leaves dropping from the two large mango trees, and tended the garden he created as a retirement project, then would shower, change clothes, and drive to the Ala Wai to work on his boat.

Now there’s no boat, no car, no garden, no yard, not much of a life.

Yet there are some days when he recounts how busy it has been.

“I spent the morning in Kona making calls,” he might say, his 60 years as a restaurant equipment salesman giving him plenty of experience in stopping by to meet current or prospective customers. Now it’s all in his head.

But I think I would prefer these vivid dreams of meeting the world and getting things done rather than the reality of waking up in the late afternoon and realizing another day has slipped by unaccounted for, time evaporating like rain drops on a hot sidewalk, hour by hour, day after day flowing by, interrupted only by meals, the regular indignity of having to rely on others to get out of bed or use the toilet, and visits from your children, themselves now older than you once imagined you would ever be.