Hilary and I sat at an outdoor cafe yesterday nearby my apartment splitting a plate of tater tots, crisped to perfection, trying to slow down and soak up the immaculate breeze on this 80 degree evening.

I looked across the street at the subsidized independent senior living apartments. They have a garden, and regulars who lounge outside in the chairs of …

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In March 2026, the SAVE loan plan - a Biden era plan - ended, or rather was deemed by this White House and Dept. of ED, to be “illegal.”” As someone who has lived and worked in New York since I was 18 years old, I have every right to transfer the burden I am feeling today onto my members of Congress. I started with Kriste…

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Hello! There has been so much to process lately in the news, I’ve found it hard to focus on this project’s aim: reporting on the everyday caregiving…

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I’m back with another video in this series about the myth, the legend, the inspiration for this Substack, my dad and caregivee, Hilary.

I spoke with him while he made a drawing recently during a particularly lucid afternoon. His old dry humor was in full swing, which is always good to see. While he’s making his art, he can be quite animated. It engages his brain in critical thinking. Also while he works, he is reminded of and can reclaim his identity, and the focus has a meditative and tranquil effect - all things that dementia will rob from an individual. I don’t have much proof in saying so, but I believe it has slowed its progression.

I hope you enjoy this glimpse at the real Hilary emerging from the fog.

If you enjoy this, please like and share!

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Like any good procrastinator, Full Circle began as another project entirely. I sat down to make a documentary, after collecting footage and interviews with Hilary shot on my iphone for the past several years. Had I sat down to write a Substack about my father, I’d probably have created the documentary instead, or perhaps I’d have taken up the guitar and written a full length Fiona Apple inspired singer songwriter album. But like the title of this newsletter implies, everything comes back around in the end. So without further ado, I’m releasing the first (of perhaps many - no promises, I don’t have time for tangents!) short-form videos about my dad Hilary. As one of his caregivers, I have full access to the subject, who has spent the past 1.5 weeks sitting 4 feet from me while I work on various projects (intentional and tangential) and - as you can see at the top - I also have his consent. Hilary likes anything about himself and fully approves this message.

Hilary Hynes, artist and my dad, speaks from memory about the color and art theory he employs in the original work he continues to make post-dementia.

It was less than an hour into my morning and after killing a roach that had crawled up from an open pipe in our kitchen – a clog that so far 3 plumbers have found un-snake-able - that I disi…

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This weekend, while celebrating the Leo of …

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“A bowl of eggs!”

Again, what?

“A bowl full of eggs,” says he, self-satisfied and nodding. Then qualifying, as if to clarify, "In my mind’s eye.”

This was the entire statement.

He was on break from being our third house cat, roaming from room to room and napping as is his routine these last several heat-driven days. Frail as he is and moving at a snail’s pace at the best of times, this heat wave more than feels like an existential threat. And yet. Last night, on the hottest day recorded in NYC since 2012, hungry, haggard, and unwilling to turn on another appliance, we left the house together for tacos at 8 o’clock at night.

Hilary appeared in the hallway ready to go - like a Walt Whitman who had cut himself shaving - in a straw hat with cane, and a striped blue button layered over another shirt tucked into long pants. I sent him back for shorts, which he fought me on.

Hilary has a complicated relationship to shorts, always has. He is self-conscious of his legs, claiming that people will laugh at him because he “has rickets.” He does not. It is one of those insecurities you have to grow up in the country with seven brothers to fully grasp. For that reason he has only one pair since the late 90’s - voluminous, knee-length khaki, cargos by an evocative maker called Vibes, Vibes, Vibes. And are they ever.

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Hilary dresses in a selection of uniforms as I've talked much about. “I’ve never had any trouble with aesthetic presentation” he told me the other day, after confidently styling his Vibes shorts with his socks pulled all the way up, leaving only a patch of knee skin visible.

In the 70s he predominantly wore full summer suits, though there is other rarer evidence of him in homemade jean shorts, bravely amongst his brothers and their kids. Beaming white legs standing out even in a group of redheads so large you could divide them into two baseball teams.

This current hot weather look is a more demure and much welcomed evolution of one he developed strictly for lawn mowing when I was a teenager. He had this pair of old worn out jeans he had cut off himself, but which he continuously failed to get even. The unfinished seam line trimmed ever and ever higher until one day they were booty shorts. Ironically this was exactly what I was begging my mom to let me leave the house in at the time. No correlation. When back inside in the air conditioning, he would read waiting for dinner on one of my mom’s custom covered Ikea couches, cross-legged in my pink ice skating leg warmers, the patch of visible skin cringely thigh-high.

I rolled my eyes at him like that teenager. All too familiarly, it was Hilary’s fear of air conditioning at the crux of our present argument, which came next after the one about the shorts, to keep the striped button down on in the 98F night weather. DC is an over-conditioned place, I said, but New York is not. One of the many adjustments.

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With all the federal workers losing their jobs in Washington, home costs have plummeted in DC. Beyond the national story, what is happening to the government is a local undoing. But why would these guys care? They already did it to San Francis…

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I think you think when we protest it is further proof you own us (the libs) and our desperate squeals are all just part of your big Machiavellian plan.

Honestly, I don’t know how much a one day pause on consumeris…

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I’ve been hanging back. Making lists. Pulled from my notes app this week:

3 crip walkers

Back at work

Saw dad’s bare ass

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St. Valentine, a 3^rd century amalgamati…

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Even given that (as I truly believe) art is essential, all artists are, fundamentally, a bit delusional. Striving for immortality by touching the souls of millions is the ultimate goal. It’s a little like world domination for the sensitive. I say this with confidence as the child of two artists, whose overall well-being has been intimately tied to their…

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Took a brisk walk in Morningside Park this morning. Morningside is more vertical than it is wide, and I ran the stairs till my legs burned, checked in on the stray cat colony cared for by a nearby school, and took in the view from the heights.

There is a lovely windchill of 12F in New York today, which I needed to rin…

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Yesterday, I dropped him off with my aunt and uncle on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. There he will enjoy a week taking in the birds, sunsets over the creek, and snuggles with their somewhat deaf cat Pi. Before we drove off, I gave them careful dir…

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