Dad Archives - Page 2 of 2

Expiration dates

Walked downstairs this evening to find dad in the kitchen unsealing a gallon bottle of Herdez green salsa, using his pocket knife to cut away the seal around the mouth.

“Oh,” I said, “did we run out of green salsa?”

“No but I saw this in the back of the fridge and figured we might as well use it.”

I frowned, pinching my eyebrows together. “I don’t know that I would trust that salsa, dad.”

“Why not?” he said. “What’s in here that would go bad?” He gestured at the bottle. I could tell my reaction to this was confusing to him.

“What’s the expiration date?” I picked up the bottle and turned it around. The label had printed on it “Good until May 2024”. I read that out loud, added “So it was good until last month. I probably bought it a year ago.”

“Well, Hell, I’m sure it’s still good.”

“OK. Let me know how that goes.” I was sure I bought it at least a year ago, long before he’d moved in. And then promptly forgot about it, because it was hidden away in the very back of my fridge, on a lower shelf, out of sight, out of mind. When I did accidentally see it in the intervening months, I felt a shiver of shame for having not used it at all, and then to avoid that bad feeling, had immediately put it out of my mind again.

Such is the weird way my brain works. I don’t have an official test or diagnosis, but from all I’ve read, this is basically ADHD, or at least something very much like it.

I went in the fridge and got a bottle of Mexican Coke out of the bin. “There’s so much food in there.”

Dad’s voice was both encouraging and tinged with fatherly concern. “Yeah, we should use it up. Hell, we have that whole package of chimichangas in there we haven’t even opened yet! That’s what I’m making for myself.”

“Yeah.” The guilt for buying food, ignoring it, and having to throw it out when it goes bad felt like a cold stone sitting in the bottom of my stomach, the cold radiating up my chest and back. I know I should eat the stuff I buy, I know I shouldn’t buy more food when there’s food still to eat. But that’s also why I tend to buy either canned goods or frozen foods, things that will keep a very long time. I know that if I don’t see it, I’ll forget about it until somethind reminds me.

If dad wasn’t here and I was buying food for myself, I would not buy nearly as much, for exactly this reason. I don’t like it when food goes bad. So I don’t buy it, then when I get hungry, I buy something from a fast food restaurant, something immediate, delicious, and expensive. Another bad habit.

I went out for a walk after that, putting on my trail shoes and wearing my coat because it’s been so rainy lately. When I got back, I made myself a pastrami sandwich, using the tomatoes, onion, and lettuce that had not yet gone bad, and opening up the new loaf of bread we had gotten, what, two grocery trips ago? No mold on the bread.

Might as well use it up.

Righty, tighty; lefty, loosey

Cars

My butt was on the ground and my hands were inside the car door, from which I had removed the interior panel. The wiring harness for the windows, door lock, mirror controls and door light snaked across the painted metal, hanging down like vines growing across a wall. My left hand held the bottom of the window glass, keeping it from sliding down from its raised position; through the access hole in the door designed by clever engineers for exactly this purpose, my right hand held the nut that I was trying to screw into the window regulator to hold the window more permanently in place. Uh-oh. I needed a third hand.

“Hey, dad,” I said, “can you get me the 10 mm socket? And the extender-thingie?”

“Sure,” dad said from behind me. I turned my head and watched as he poked through the toolbox, which was sitting on the rear passenger seat, that door also open. Otherwise my entire field of view was this unassembled door.

Four days earlier, after driving dad over to my nephew’s house to watch their cat while my nephew and his wife went camping, my inside car door handle had stopped working. I had hurriedly and in frustration given maybe a bit too much force to the switch to roll the driver’s side window down so I could exit. After chatting with dad and my nephew, I’d gotten back in the car and found that the window switch had broken, too.

Hazards of driving an old car. My car was new in 1996 but increasingly less so every year after that. I’m the third owner, and while it continues to run with just minor maintenance – I joke that as long as I keep the fluids topped up, it’ll outlast me – some things are just worn and fragile. In fact, this is the second time the window switch has broken. It’s a cheap part, but annoying to replace.

Behind me I heard dad click the socket onto the extension-thingie. “Here, son,” he handed it down to me. I asked him to hold the window in place, then used both hands to put the socket on the bolt head, and turn it.

“Righty, tighty; lefty, loosey,” dad said, ironically.

I chuckled. “I know! I learned that from you, at least.”

I’d learned a lot from dad, including many lessons that seemed to be simple rules for living under his roof growing up, but turned out to be cleverly disguised as life lessons. When I was a kid, our roles would be reversed from what I was doing now. He’d be the one with his head and hands on thing he was fixing; I’d be the one who had to find and bring the right tool, the tool he’d forgotten he’d needed right then and there. That lesson was “know your tools” and I always thought it was like magic how he could look at a bolt and know, somehow, that it was a 12 mm, or a 3/8″, depending on the circumstances and the part.

“I don’t care if you borrow my tools,” he told me, “as long as you put them back where you found them.” Again, that’s something specific for him; he always tried to keep his toolbox organized, the garage neat and tidy; he’d clean up spilled oil, polish his Craftsman wrenches before sorting them into their proper places. But that’s also a lesson about life. It’s OK to share, but make sure you return what you’ve borrowed.

He taught me how to maintain a car, what the parts of the car did, and backed it up with the lesson “Don’t just be a parts-swapper; fix the problem.” He had unkind words for engineers who designed things without any care for how the things would be used; he dismissed them as idealist eggheads, generally speaking. Dad was always a blue-collar working-class guy. He got dirt under his fingernails, he barked his knuckles trying to turn a wrench in tight spaces. And even though I was distracted, angsty, and dealing with a brain that I would not learn until much much later operated in non-standard ways, I did learn from him.

Happy Father’s Day, dad. I would not be the person I am today without your guidance and advice. Love your guts.

The Devil and Bean Dad

Music

In the car with dad, me driving, him riding shotgun. I was driving carefully through busy freeway traffic, navigating west on the Banfield on our way to a doctor’s appointment for him.

My Happy playlist was on shuffle, volume low, but I caught the opening chords of a driving buzzing guitar riff, and John Roderick’s warm, dynamic, resonant voice sang

“American schools called you Starlight
in fourteen point type
Ten times ten, and then
your most brutal-ful smile”

and I couldn’t help but turn the volume up and try to sing along. My voice, ravaged by a persistent cough and allergies, couldn’t keep up even at my best, but I did nod my head along to the beat.

Dad, his neck artificially stiffened with the metal rods the surgeons used to repair his broken spine, looked over at me from the corner of his eye, his head turning like Batman, from the shoulders. Dad’s mouth turned into a little smile.

“I,” I said, “have such… complicated feelings about this song.”

Dad’s eyebrow crooked a question at me that I could feel even though my eyes were fixed forward out the windshield. The wipers intermittently wiped away droplets of rain, squeaking just over the music.

“I don’t imagine you’ve ever heard of The Long Winters, but they are basically John Roderick. I’m pretty sure this whole album was written and performed by him, maybe with some session players from Seattle. I first heard him play as an opening act for another band I love.”

Long pause as the memories of standing at the edge of the stage of the Aladdin Theater, next to the speakers, listening to John Roderick and Sean Nelson from Harvey Danger, performing together. And at my side, she leaned into me, softly singing along. I felt her tiny but strong body fit perfectly against mine, my arm around her lower back.

“It was an early date with… Deb.” Or as my friends at the time called her, Devil. I scoured my memory. I don’t think Deb ever met any of my family. That had actually been a red flag. “You never met her, but Deb and I had one of those hot-and-cold relationships. We were either madly in love, or hated each others’ guts. And since we discovered The Long Winters together, when he sings about the New Girl, I can only think of Deb.”

“You erased so many mistakes
By sitting up and smiling
Your solo show
I hope it never closes
It was the ride of my life
Twice, you burned your life’s work
Once to start a new life
And once just to start a fire”

I laughed, loudly, suddenly, in the car. I gestured with a free hand, palm down, showing one level, then moving my hand up to cut a higher level. “And then, on top of all of that, there’s the whole Bean Dad thing.” I laughed again, feeling dad’s confusion at the reference.

“I don’t know what that means,” he said, finally.

“I know, I know! Sorry. So several years ago, John Roderick got canceled on Twitter for making a dumb joke about making his daughter cook some beans. He was trying to be funny, to play a character, the mean dad who makes his child do something hard to teach her a lesson, and it did not go over well. He got pushback, and instead of just saying he was exagerating, he doubled down and pushed back even harder. Eventually he deleted his Twitter account, stopped making his podcasts, and the Kids Online called him Bean Dad. It was silly and stupid.”

“If my nephew or neice were in the car right now and this song came on, they would have their own reaction to this, probably a very negative reaction. But damn, if I don’t love their music.”

So many complicated feelings in one song. And despite my attempt at explanation, I was quite certain dad had not even the slightest idea what I was talking about.

We drove over the ramp from the Banfield onto I-205 South, in the gray Friday rain.

Tired and whatnot

Daily Story Project

I’ve made a note of some ideas about things I can write about but for some reason, that reason probably being my dumb brain that hates doing boring things that aren’t novel or urgent, I can’t bring myself to write about them. So this entry will become another stream-of-consciousness flow of random stuff until I reach around five hundred words, as have they all been for the most part. Sure, some of the past entries have been coherent but that is not what I’m feeling today.

I’m tired, is what I’m feeling. Like sleepy tired, but also mentally tired of the dumb job hunting and the endless capitalism and the grind of having Things that Need Doing. Life hasn’t had a lot of joy lately for me. Brief moments of happiness or enjoyment but actual full-on joy? Not present, man.

Physically tired because yesterday I ramped up my exercise routine. Been walking at least once a day every day for several weeks now, thanks to inspiration and a challenge from my friend Christi through our Apple Watches. Walking is great but I miss running, so because I’ve been nailin’ it in the walking thing I pushed myself to try adding little jogging segements. Nothing crazy, just a block or two, and then I let my heart rate ramp back down before going again. It felt good to do it; I’ve always said that running makes me feel human, by which I mean feeling myself in my body, and not living in my head. And even though I returned home sweaty and tired I wasn’t injured or hurt; no pain just discomfort from having worked my muscles harder than normal. I went out and did another, slower walk later in the day, after dinner, to keep my body in motion, and maybe that helped prevent soreness and pain.

And today, my legs and back feel a bit stiff but mostly what I feel is sleepy. I don’t want to move much. I just want to sit, or lay down ideally. I want to be still, close my eyes, and drift into a nap.

Can I do that? After this post. I promise, Me. You can rest soon. Just another 132 words after that last sentence. Keep going.

The mental tired is also a problem. Is this brain fog? Am I a victim of Long Covid? How could I tell? That’s not a diagnosis that doctors are handing out these days. I’m sure I’m just worried about All of This. It’s nice having my dad here, though. It gives me a bit of comfort knowing someone else is around. Dad and I didn’t always have the best relationship but it’s pretty solid now.

How did I get to my dad from exercise? Oh, probably because he can’t exercise. Well, walking around, slowly, is the most exercise he gets these days, being in his late 80s, and having had surgery to repair his broken spine and ribs less than a year ago. That puts exercise into perspective. Right?