Daddy Day care

I am at that age where the tables of life are turned and I am, along with my brother, becoming the caregiver for my daddy.

He’s doing pretty well, actually, to be 85, but he’s needed some help recently because of medical issues. This helps consists mostly of driving him to doctor’s appointments in Atlanta. He still drives, and would probably drive up there by himself if we would let him, but I would not feel comfortable with him driving on the interstate unless they closed the whole thing down first, like they do for the president, and installed bumper guards on the guardrails. 

He has officially entered cute old man stage. Women love cute old men and flirt with them shamelessly. He of course plays into this by flirting back and saying pretty much anything that pops into his head, to anybody, at any time. Nurses and waitresses and office workers just laugh and smile at him. Part of the charm seems to be that he wears suspenders. Us average-looking middle-aged men get no attention at all when a cute old man is around.

I took him to the hospital recently for a procedure. He was talking to a woman who was checking him in, and somehow it came out that her grandmother and he grew up in the same town. She wondered if maybe my dad knew her grandmother. I don’t know to politely say this, but in a small south Georgia town in the 1930s – well, it’s just not likely that daddy and this woman’s grandmother hung out much, you know?

But then the nice lady says “Here, I’ll show you a picture,” and hands a photo to my daddy. I held my breath, waiting to see what he would say.

He perused the photo and said, “She’s a nice-looking woman.”

Phew.

Then as he handed it back to the lady he said, “She was a big woman, just like you.”

Oh Lord.

The nice lady just laughed and said, “Oh, Mr. Williams, you’re just too much!”

She seemed to not mind that he had just called her fat. I guess it was the suspenders.

These long car rides to the doctor’s offices are not so bad. It gives us some time to talk. He had a great interest in the price of gasoline despite the fact he probably only has to fill his tank up once a month, as little as he drives now. We talk about the Braves and the weather and our respective dogs, etc. When I’m taking him back home, he’ll point out where I need to turn to get to his house, which is helpful, because I only lived there for about TEN YEARS and I might have forgotten.

I am hopeful that my kids will help me out one day when I need them, though they’re still at that cute age where you pretty much have to pull a gun on them to get them to turn on the dishwasher or bring in groceries from the car. I imagine they’ll be nice to me until they figure out their inheritance is going to work out to about $17.50 apiece.

Well, here’s hoping I have a good, long time left to take Daddy to the doctor or to the Cracker Barrel or wherever he needs to go, and that someday, when I start wearing suspenders of my own, I’ll have somebody to take me.

Emptying the nest

I dropped my youngest child off at college this week. I had been denying to myself for about 18 years that this day would ever come, but time marches on – or rather, rolls over you like a Panzer division - and there I was.

While my wife had been a sobbing mess for the previous week, I had decided to be a man and be strong and not cry like some sort of blubbering fool. I mean, this was a good thing – the boy was embarking on a new adventure, going out to seize the world, and I was going to be able to pour milk on my cereal without worrying how much of his slobber was going to land on my Corn Flakes (never could stop him from drinking directly from the carton).

I held up pretty well throughout the day, cracking jokes and complaining about how much stuff he brought. Just before we left him, he unpacked his Bible and put it by his bed, because he reads from it every night after spending about eight hours of shooting people on his X-box (a slight contradiction, but who am I to question?). Well, that got to me a little bit, but I just pretended I was coming down with a cold, slipped him some cash, hugged him and headed out.

I was still ok when I got home, but later that night, a little bit before it was time for bed, the damn stupid dog did me in. For a long time Lucky has slept in the room with David every night, curling up on her doggie bed and lying still for so long we’ve come close to burying her twice. But this night, she was just lying there outside his door, waiting for him, and when I walked by she gave me the “shelter face” and I could almost hear a Sarah McClachlan song in the background, and, well, it was all too much.

I remember my mother crying when I went off to college, and I remember humoring her but thinking it was ridiculous that she should cry over that. I imagine she was looking down on me from Heaven laughing at my fool self that night.

Why is this so sad? I don’t know. I suppose I’ll get over it soon – I felt the same way when Allie went off for the first time, but eventually got used to it. I’m not sure poor Lucky is going to recover for quite some time, however.

I was at the track the other night and I saw a man with his younger daughter, pushing her on the swings, and I resisted the urge to go tell him, “Don’t get too attached to her. She’s gonna move out and break your heart someday.”

Well, all you can do is try hard to raise them right and make sure they grow up to be good human beings who won’t try to put you in a nursing home the first time you twist your ankle. I take solace in knowing that both my kids are much better people than I was at their age.

It does seem like yesterday – you’ll have to forgive me for my use of clichés – that I would come home from work and be met at the front door by a little fella holding a plastic baseball bat or a NERF football, waiting patiently for me to get changed so we could go out to the front yard and enjoy the rest of the remaining daylight. One day my wife told me that some boys had come and tried to get him to go play with them, but he told them no, he didn’t want to, he was waiting for his dad to come home and he’d rather play with him.

(I will pause here for a moment so you can wipe your eyes. I’ll do the same).

I can tell you that I never minded or turned down those play sessions. Even though I’m gonna need rotator cuff surgery eventually for all the deep passes I threw, it was worth it. I raised a fine young man, and some day he’ll have kids of his own (not too soon, son, if you’re reading this), and I can just about guarantee you he won’t say no when he’s asked to go play catch.

Don't be an a-hole!

I am now frighteningly close to 50 years old, and that has caused me to undergo some serious self-examination.

No, I don’t mean looking for new places from where hair is now sprouting. (Seriously, what’s up with that? I think if men could live to be 200 years old, we’d be covered in hair like an ape. I bet Methuselah resembled a Tibetan yak when he finally kicked the bucket).

I’m talking about the need to examine the type of person I’ve become, or person that I was all along, and am just now really realizing it. Let me give you an example:

The other day, I was running on the trail at a nearby elementary school, when I see this guy with a big dog. I immediately got agitated, because dogs aren’t allowed at this park, and there are signs posted everywhere to that effect, but this guy apparently just ignored it. But I decided to let it go, figuring he didn’t know any better.

Then I came around the corner and his dog –a big one, probably around 70 pounds – was running around without a leash. I came close to saying something but was still going to remain quiet, until the dog made a couple of kamikaze runs at my legs and knocked me off balance. I snatched out my earbuds, turned around and yelled at the guy “Hey, there’s no dogs allowed here. There are signs all over the place.”

The man said, “Really? I used to be able to bring my dog here.”

“Well, you can’t now,” I said. “And especially not on a leash. You can’t let a dog run anywhere in the county without a leash, dude.” Yes, I called him “dude”. And having told this fella what’s what, I haughtily snapped my earbuds back in place and did another lap.

When I came back around, I noticed he was sitting on a bench, and his dog was nowhere to be found. Well, this was ridiculous, I thought. He’s just going to ignore me and the signs and let his dog run around and terrorize people. So I walked over to have a word.

As I got closer, I noticed this man was pretty old – probably at least 75. He was sweating profusely, and as I got close he looked at me with a very sad expression.
“I’m very sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been here in 7 years and I didn’t’ know they had banned dogs from the park.” I said OK, no problem, then he said, “I can’t get him to come back. I just adopted him from the shelter a few weeks ago and he doesn’t mind me yet. I’m afraid I’m too old to go chase him.”

Well, now I was feeling lower than a frog’s ankle. I saw the dog a few feet away, near a creek, and I was able to go over and grab him and hold him while the man came over. He thanked me profusely and apologized again, and I nodded and ran off before he had a chance to tell me that his wife had just died or his other dog had gotten run over or something else that would make me feel even worse.

So I got to thinking as I continued my run, and a very troubling question popped into my brain and it wouldn’t go away, even when I put Van Halen on my iPod and turned the volume up to 11, and the question was this: Am I an a-hole?

I think it’s quite possible. I certainly acted like one toward that old man. And it’s not the first time I’ve done that.

There was a woman who worked downstairs in the cafeteria in my office building. She would dip the vegetables, and she was frighteningly slow and confused most of the time. You asked for squash, she’d give you corn. You asked for butterbeans, you might get cabbage. You get the picture.

I would get very frustrated with this woman, roll my eyes, say things under my breath, and generally act like – well, an a-hole. I remember once I actually muttered, “Is it really that hard?” I must have said it louder than I thought, cause I looked around at the other people in the line, and they were all staring at me like I’d just stepped on a kitten.

So one day, I was going through the checkout line, and there was a framed photo of the woman by the cash register, and I heard the cashier telling the customer in front of me that the lady had died the previous weekend. Feeling a bit abashed, I asked the cashier what had happened.

“Oh, she had Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” she said. “Poor thing, she just didn’t want to be stuck at home, so she kept working for as long as she could. We sure do miss her. She was the sweetest thing.”

Holy Crap. Lou Gehrig’s Disease? What kind of an a-hole would fuss at a woman fighting Lou Gehrig’s Disease? (In my defense, I didn’t KNOW she had that – but still).

So maybe I really am just an a-hole. I don’t have a reason to be. I complain about my job, but I know some folks who have been out of work for a long time and are desperate to find a job. I get frustrated because my back and stomach have hurt every day for 3 ½ years, but I have some friends who are fighting cancer, and they aren’t letting it get them down at all.

I actually got angry the other day when the DVR messed up and I missed about 15 minutes of the golf tournament I was watching. Think about that – I’m sitting in an air-conditioned house, watching a TV screen the size of a billboard, a bag of chips on my lap, and I’m able to hit the pause button so I can leave the room and never miss a second of what I’m watching – and it made me angry that I had to miss 15 minutes of millionaires hitting balls around a big green pasture.

There are other instances. There are probably drive-through windows all over metro Atlanta with my photo on the wall and the words “Be on the lookout for this impatient a-hole” underneath. There quite likely are photos taken by traffic cams that could be used against me in a political campaign because of the gestures I used. And God help me if any of the other drivers are lip-readers.

Now, again in my defense, there have been some a-holes through history who accomplished some great things. These include:

• King Herod, who allegedly killed a lot of babies, but also built some really cool things in Jerusalem.
• Gen. George Patton, who slapped a shell-shocked soldier in the face, but killed a lot of Nazis.
• Musicians such as John Lennon, Neil Young and Elvis Costello, who often weren’t much fun to be around but who made some of the greatest albums of all time.

Of course, I haven’t accomplished anything, so maybe I really need to just stop being an a-hole altogether. I have no excuse. I might some day get cancer or Lou Gehrig’s disease or a big dog I can’t control – wait, I already have that one – and the last thing I’ll want to deal with if any of that happens is some a-hole.

How does my garden grow?

When I was growing up, my dad always planted a big vegetable garden. Being a stupid teenager (I know – redundant), I thought this was pure folly. After all, you could get pretty much any vegetable you wanted at the grocery store. All you needed was a can opener.

But he’d come home from his job at the General Motors assembly plant and get out there and plow up rows and plant seeds and hoe out the weeds. He’d grow butterbeans and peas and squash and cucumbers and okra, none of which I liked to eat. I pretty much lived off of Burger King. Had he planted Whoppers and french fries, I might have been interested.

The few times I’d actually pull myself away from watching Gilligan’s Island and look out there, it almost appeared that he was enjoying himself. I thought he must be insane.

However, the good part was, he pretty much left me out of it – until, that is, the vegetables were actually picked. Then HIS hobby became MY hobby, because all those beans and peas had to be shelled. Maybe I didn’t have the inclination – or sense – to get out and actually help in the garden, but I had two working thumbs, so I was expected to participate in the shelling process.

It was really kind of a social thing. We’d go visit people sometimes, and my late mother would grab a bucket and start shelling butterbeans while they talked. I shelled while watching Braves’ games or just sitting on the back porch talking to mom, shelled until my thumbs bled and my fingernails turned green. It was just part of life.

I grew out of my teenage years, so my brain became fully-formed and I realized that I actually enjoy eating vegetables, and that they’re so much better when they’re fresh. If I went to Burger King now I’d need to order a defibrillator as a side dish.

And this year, at the age of don’t-worry-about-it, I decided to plant a garden of my own – peas, squash, cucumbers, okra, and watermelon. My garden is planted right alongside that of my dad’s, on his land down in Lamar County. One half is mine.

I was going to plant pole beans, but dad informed me that you had to plant those next to a pole, so they’ll grow. Well, who knew THAT was why they called them pole beans? I just thought they were discovered in Poland or something.

I decided this would be a fun thing to do with my father. He’s 84 now, and I thought it would be a way to spend some quality time together. It’s hard to talk to him in the house, because he keeps the TV set at roughly the decibel level of a Black Sabbath concert. I’m going to have to learn sign language to communicate with him before long.

I had great plans to do a lot of stress-relieving, out-in-the-open work in this garden of mine – till the ground, put up some posts and wire and hang some things to keep the deer out, etc. I researched this thoroughly, meaning I Googled “Best way to grow vegetables in Georgia.” I was ready.

I went down to my garden spot to discover my father had already tilled the ground, put up posts, strung some wire, and hung some soap to keep the deer away. Then he proceeded to show me how to plant seeds - break up the ground, put in some fertilizer, mix it in, open the ground back up, put in the seeds, cover it up. Well, duh. What am I, a moron? Who didn’t know that? I DO have access to the Internet, you know.

I started working on my row, and then I looked up and my dad was at the other end of the row, opening up the ground with some sort of garden tool. It was 80 degrees and the sun was beating down and he was sweating – and did I mention he’s 84 YEARS OLD? – and I told him to stop, I would handle it, I knew how to do it.

Why was he giving me so much help? Well, half because he wanted to be helpful, and half because he suspects I’m an idiot who can’t do anything. He thinks this, in part, because he knew me when I was a teenager and a young adult, when I was an idiot who couldn’t do anything. And also, that’s sort of the default position for a father when he thinks of his son.

So I put out my fertilizer, and dropping my seeds on the ground when he looked at me and said, “Did you open the ground back up?” Well, no, matter of fact, I had not. “What are you, a moron?” he said.

Well anyway, I got the suckers planted, and when I went down to check on the garden a couple of weeks later, there were little green sprouts coming out of the ground. Dad is watering them for me, and I’m assuming that at some point they’ll get taller and I’ll have peas to shell and watermelons to cut and squash to – well, I don’t really know what you do to squash, but I can Google it.

Then I can get me a pan, fill it full of peas, turn on the Braves’ game and start working my thumbs while wishing my mom was there for me to talk to. I can hardly wait.

Dead zone

How are we supposed to act, or feel, when people die?

Our reflexive response when someone tells us of a death is, “I’m sorry to hear that.” We say this whether or not we’re actually sorry to hear it. It just seems like the polite thing to say.

We may not be sorry, though I assume what we’re really saying is, we’re sorry that somebody we know is experiencing a loss. And if it’s somebody we knew and liked who died, then we genuinely feel some degree of grief.

It’s pretty much accepted that you’re not allowed to be happy when somebody dies, unless it’s someone despicable like Hitler or Bin Laden or Urban Meyer. (for all you wearing blue jean shorts, that was just a joke.)

One of my professors from UGA, Conrad Fink, died recently. Now, I didn’t know him well at all, but I knew a few people who did, and they always spoke highly of him. I took one journalism class from him, and a few things stood out in my memory:
• He would throw erasers at me when I was drifting off to sleep or not paying attention in his class, which was often.
• He told a highly entertaining story about when, during his days as a reporter, he had a testy encounter with the King of Borneo. I don’t know nor care if it was true, but it was a great story.
• He always said to write for the “Kansas City milkman”, which meant keep your stories simple and understandable so even the least educated among us could enjoy them. I guess today he might say to write them for people who watch Jersey Shore.
• He pulled me into his office one day and told me that he thought I was the best writer in his class (is this bragging? Probably so), but that I didn’t have any “fire in my belly” and I should forget journalism and go somewhere like Coca-Cola and get a job in the public relations department. I was offended and angered by this and went on to have a lucrative 10-year career in newspapers, which ended when I went to Coca-Cola and got a job in their public relations department.

So even though I didn’t know Professor Fink that well or for that long, he did have an impact on my life, and I did note his death with some sadness.

Then recently, another person from my past died, and this was somebody I didn’t care for too much. He was generally not a nice person, thought most people thought he was. I found him to be dishonest, manipulative and mean-spirited. Maybe, as hard as this is to fathom, he just didn’t like me, so I never got to see whatever good side he might have had.

So while I didn’t pop open a cold bottle of Pink Champale when I learned he had died, I didn’t feel particularly sad, either. And I didn’t feel bad about not feeling sad. Maybe this makes me a bad person. I just don’t know.

The idea of death used to freak me out. I can remember going to funeral homes when some great-aunt or another died, and my mother would go to the casket and proclaim, “Oh, she looks so pretty!” Uh, hello, mom, no she doesn’t. Aunt Jenny is DEAD! She does not look pretty. She looks stuffed.

In The Return of the King, Gandalf tells one of the hobbits, “Death is just another part of the journey.” Of course, that was easy for him to say, since he had already died and been resurrected by that time. Oh, and he was a wizard. But I guess if that’s the case, we should just look at it as a chance to wish people well on the rest of their journey, and if we didn’t like them, hope we don’t run into them again when our time comes.

Paint the town beige

The driveway at my house generally looks like a used-car lot, in part because we haven’t been able to fit a vehicle in our garage since about a week after we moved in. There’s a refrigerator, freezer, dog crate, cedar chest and rusting universal gym in there, but no cars.

So the other day, I took notice of what was parked in front of my house:

- a fairly-new Saturn SUV, driven by my wife;
- a sporty red Ford Mustang with new rims and tires and all sorts of decals that my son added, I assume so he could attract even more police attention;
- a nice Dodge Stratus that is driven by my daughter and is only a few years old and in very good condition, except for the inexplicable make-up smears on the radio dial;
- and an absolute piece-of-crap 2000 beige Chevy Impala, with about 130,000 miles on it and a crack in the windshield that looks like an aerial view of the Snake River. This, of course, is my car.

How did this happen? My son’s car has a sound system that would be the envy of Dr. Dre, and all the Impala has is a radio and a cassette player. They stopped making cassettes about, what, 20 years ago? Do you know how tired I am of listening to sports-talk radio and Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits?

This morning went outside about 6:20 a.m. to discover the Beige Love Machine was covered in permafrost. So I got an empty cassette case, scraped off as much ice as I could, cranked the beast and headed off to work.

I’d gone about 10 miles when it dawned on me that, somehow, the air coming out of the vents was actually colder than the outside temperature. Instead of defrosting my windshield, it was glazing it. Try sticking your head out the window on I-75 so you can see where you’re going on a 30-degree morning. It’s a miracle a truck didn’t swerve into my lane and Ichabod Crane-me. My head was colder than Ted Williams’ when I finally got to work.

Before I got the Impala, I was sporting around town in a 1997 Plymouth mini-van, a chick magnet if there ever was one. But that was like a Lamborghini compared to the AARP-mobile I’m driving around in now.

Why does Dad, the guy who pays for the car insurance and makes sure the oil gets changed and the tires get rotated for everybody, have to drive the worst car? I should be tooling around in style, in some sort of turbo-charged sporty convertible while the rest of them drive Yugos that have to be parked facing downhill in order for them to start. It’s just not fair.

Nobody in the family but me and Lucky will even ride in my car, and even she won’t put her head out the window because she’s embarrassed for other dogs to see her.

Oh, well. Someday, when the house is paid for and I get the kids off the payroll, I’m going to get a nice car for myself, even if I’m too old to drive it. I’ll get something fancy that even has a CD player, and me and Bob Seger will just sit in the driveway and have the times of our lives.

Phoning it in

There’s an exchange on my answering machine between me and my son that we’ve preserved to listen to whenever we want to laugh, or cry, perhaps.

It was one of those cases where I called the house and he didn’t pick up until after the answering machine had kicked on, so the entire conversation was recorded, and it went something like this:

Him: Hello?
Me: Hey. What’s going on?
Him: (uintelligible)
Me: Is your mom home?
Him: No.
Me: Do you know where she went?
Him: (grunt)
Me: Did she say when she was coming back?
Him: No.
Me: Ok, will you please tell her to call me when she gets in?
Him: (garbled):
Click.

I see these TV commercials where they tell us parents we should talk to our kids, and I’m like, YOU come try and talk to them. And bring a teenager-to-English dictionary to translate.

Of course, people under 20 don’t talk on the phone at all anymore. They send text messages with words like “u” and “r” and “l8r” and “idk” which is just a way to confuse us poor helpless parents and trick us into saying yes when they ask us if they can go to a marijuana-sampling party at a friend’s house.

When I was that age (yes, I use this phrase all the time now), it was quite different. We talked on the phone, which was a big old rotary beast that had to be dialed. We made prank calls, like calling the grocery store and asking, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?”, and when they said yes, we said “Well, you’d better let him out before he suffocates!” Funny, funny stuff.

I remember my first-ever prank call. I was a little boy, less than 10, and I wanted to call somebody, but I didn’t know anybody’s number. So I just dialed 0, and when the operator picked up, I said, “Go to hell,” then hung up the phone and wondered which one of my friends I would tell first, to impress.

About 5 seconds after I hung up, the phone rang, and a stab of fear went through my body like an errant javelin. I let it ring 4 times, then picked up to hear a woman say, “”Are you the little boy who was playing on the phone?”

“Yes, m’am,” I said in a trembling voice.

“Well, I’m going to call your mother and tell her when she gets home.”

That evil crone at the phone company scared me to death. That night, the next day, and for weeks and months and years after that, I waited for the day when that fateful phone call would be made, and my mother would look at me and say, “Go get me a switch.” But the call never came, which was the genius part of the operator’s diabolical plan. She made sure I lived in fear for my transgression. To this day, I still jump when the phone rings unexpectedly. I really don’t think the punishment fit the crime here.

When I was about 15, my parents moved to a neighboring county. As hard as this may be to believe now, in those days, calls to the next county were long distance, and thus cost more. This was important to me because all of the girls I wanted to woo were in the county I moved from, not the new one. And writing a letter is not a great way to ask a girl out, unless she lives in Russia and you’re planning to buy her.

My parents, after moving me to the wasteland of Lamar County, also informed me that I would have to pay for any long distance calls that I made. This was difficult, as I had no money, and even when I got a job at the age of 16, the little bit of money I had was ticketed for the expenses I would incur if/when I ever persuaded one of these girls to go on a date.

So I had to put some change in my pocket, get into my car and drive across the county line to a quaint little town/convenience store called Orchard Hill, where there was a pay phone. This method of calling girls – which, really, is the only reason a boy, or man for that matter, ever needs to use a telephone – was fraught with pitfalls.

For one, there was no guarantee the pay phone would be available. You couldn’t reserve it, or kick somebody off it. So I was taking a leap of faith just by driving up there.

Then, you could not be assured that the girl you were calling would be home. Most people didn’t have answering machines then, so you couldn’t leave a message. I would just stand there forlornly and listen to the ring, ring, ring, hoping maybe she was just in the shower or outside and would soon hear the phone ringing and rush in and pick it up breathlessly and – but that never happened. Instead, I’d just hang up and decide whether to try again.

Then there was the dreaded busy signal. This was worse than no answer, because now you knew she was probably at home, and talking to some skunk who you thought was your best friend, but who had been lucky enough to call her before you did, and was monopolizing the durn phone, and probably asking her out! (Do I still seem angry?) In truth, it was generally just her mom on the phone, or her sister, and I would get angry and have fantasies about purchasing a handgun and shooting my former best friend for nothing.

Of course, there was no call waiting or caller ID then, so if you got a busy signal, you got a busy signal. You could, in case of emergencies, have the operator break into a call, but that seemed a bit extreme for a 16-year-old boy trying to get a date. Then again, when you think about the raging hormones at that age, maybe it did qualify as an emergency.

My pay phone of choice was unfortunately located next to a train track. A roaring locomotive 10 feet away puts quite a damper on a conversation. I’d hear that train a’comin’, and I’d either hurry up and say what I was going to say - “HeywillyougooutwithmeSaturdaynight?” – or I’d ask her to hang on and wait for the train to pass. Inevitably, she’d have hung up by the time it got quiet again, having decided she didn’t want to go on a date with a loser who asked her out from a pay phone.

I guess it is easier to ask girls out these days, but then it’s probably easier for them so say no, too. So maybe the good old days had their selling points, after all.