#Slice 2013: 20 of 31- The Gift of Balance

During the month of March, I am participating in the Slice of Life Challenge, hosted by Stacey Shubitz and Ruth Ayres at twowritingteachers.wordpress.com. I have started a new blog because this challenge has inspired me to work on my own creative writing. This post is part of a series about presents that I am working on, inspired by The Twelve Kinds of Ice by Ellen Bryan Obed. My father had a serious accident eleven years ago and I have been trying to figure out a way to write about it ever since. I'm trying to through this series of memoirs about the gifts he has given me and my family members throughout our lives.

For other posts in the series, please head over to tworeflectiveteachers.blogspot.com, which is where I began the series.

The Gift of Balance

I definitely looked forward to my parents' visits when I was in college. My mom would take me to the grocery store and stock up my refrigerator. She helped me with the laundry and we all went for walks around the campus. When they came, I explored campus corners that I might not have gone to otherwise, since college students don't appreciate the surroundings as much as they should. My parents would take me and usually a friend or sometimes a few friends out to dinner and then, if my dad, had his way, we would go out.

My dad still loves to talk about his college days and he still loves to tip back his glass. He has a few stories that we hear frequently about his years on campus so it should come as no surprise that he loved the whole college scene and was thrilled to re-live some of it, even just for short periods of time. The partying life was an important part. Almost always, he'd outlast my mother.

"How about if we drop your mom off," he'd say. "I think I have a little longer in me."

 I'd take the keys.

Then the fun started. Dad had been a smoker when I was a young child and had quit his two pack a day habit cold turkey when I was around ten. At a crowded house party, I was apt to find him on the porch smoking and guffawing with some of my friends.

"Dad, what are you doing?" I remember saying. 

Looking like a cat with a yellow feather in his mouth instead of a middle aged man with a Marlboro, he'd stuff the cigarette into an almost empty cup of beer. "I'm just having a good time," was his quick response. "Randy here was telling me about his plans for medical school." 

My friends would laugh and high five him. They caught on quickly that he was a lot of fun to have around. He taught them how to roll a quarter off their noses and bounce it into a beer cup and he did his best to keep up with beer pong and thumper. I don't think they played those games much when he was in college, based on his skill levels.

"You have a cool dad," my friends would say both in front of him and after he got tired and I drove him home. I don't remember that he was known as the "cool dad" when I was in high school; I think that he worked really hard and work wasn't available to him when he was on my college campus. Also, he respected rules and we weren't legal to drink when we were in high school. I'd guess that our 21st birthdays were pretty liberating for my dad, as well as for us.

My father knew how to work hard, play hard, and set a high bar. While he was that dad at night when he visited, in the morning, he wanted to know about classes. He definitely preferred hearing about organic chemistry and my fruit fly crosses in genetics, but he also wanted to know about my education seminars. He wanted to know that I was working hard,  keeping up my grades, and enjoying what I was doing. Right up until I signed my first teaching contract, I think he held on to the hope that I'd follow his footsteps into medicine, but he appreciated my love for education and his goal was to set us on pathways toward happiness and success, hard work and fun.

He did.

Enjoy your gifts,

#Slice 2013: 18 of 31- The Gift of Gold

During the month of March, I have been participating in the Slice of Life Challenge, hosted by Stacey Shubitz and Ruth Ayres at twowritingteachers.wordpress.com. I have started a new blog because this challenge has inspired me to work on my own creative writing. This post is part of a series about presents that I am working on, inspired by The Twelve Kinds of Ice by Ellen Bryan Obed. My father had a serious accident eleven years ago and I have been trying to figure out a way to write about it ever since. I'm trying to through this series of memoirs about the gifts he has given me and my family members throughout our lives.

For other posts in the series, please head over to tworeflectiveteachers.blogspot.com, which is where I began the series a few days ago.

The Gift of Gold

One of the hardest rites of passage that sometimes we have to do is taking away our parent's car. For a few years after his accident, my father seemed okay to drive and we let him. But, then he had an accident pulling out of a parking place. Maybe he had turned his head to check for traffic and didn't see the oncoming car because of his crushed optic nerve from the fall. Thank goodness no one was hurt. Soon after, he got lost on the way to a concert at my daughter's school, the same school I had gone to as a child--only three miles from our house.

Losing his freedom was hard for my dad and he tried hard to find ways to resurrect a car for himself. I think that the years when he couldn't drive but still knew a holiday was coming were the hardest for him because he loved to surprise people with gifts. Dad was always resourceful, even as he struggled with memory so none of us should have been surprised when he found a way to surprise us at Christmas time.

I was in the kitchen when the UPS man showed up. We all had been doing some virtual shopping so he was a pretty common visitor at our house. Today, he had a small, heavy box.

"What do you have, there, Tom," I asked. (Is it worrisome that I am on a first name basis with the UPS man?)

"Not sure," he answered. "It's for John Cavo, though. I need a signature."

"My father?" I'm sure that my voice didn't mask my surprise.

Tom looked at the label and nodded. I didn't know that my father had any idea of how to shop on-line. He used the computer for solitaire and that was about it, but Dad had always loved Christmas and giving. Could he have conspired with my husband, perhaps, to order something? Maybe Garth forgot to let me know.

Tom handed me the package and I looked at the label. The return address was from Sunkist. Had Dad ordered oranges? I looked at the box again. It was the size of a half a brick and weighed a lot. An orange would not fit in the box. As I looked at the label more closely, I realized that the small print said 14 carat. What? Something about this worried me. My mother and I had been discussing how to manage my father's credit card since he had been suggesting that he was going to buy himself a new car. I thought that maybe a credit limit would make sense. My mother was struggling with taking away more of his power and independence. I didn't blame her.

"Tom," I asked, as he handed me his clipboard to sign. "Can we return this to the sender?"

He shrugged. "Don't see why not." He looked at the box. "Actually, I think that it has to be sent by the purchaser."

My parents were not home so Tom left the box and I waited until they returned. When they came in, I took my dad aside. At first, he did not seem to know what I was talking about. Had he ordered gold, I wanted to know.  Finally, he seemed to remember.

"I think I ordered your mother a present," he said.

"What did you order, Dad?" I asked. "Could it have been gold?"

"That's it," he said. "I got her some gold."

I nodded and I am sure that at that moment, I really didn't know what to do. A box of gold did not seem like the present that my mother would want on Christmas morning, but I understood my dad wanting to get something and I had to appreciate the guy's resourcefulness. He had seen an ad in the paper for gold and had ordered some. He couldn't remember where the ad had been or what the name of the company was. He had just liked it as an idea and had called them up. The person on the receiving end had been happy to process his order and his credit card number, I'm sure.

As it turned out, I helped my dad return the gold, after talking to my mom about it. Then, I took him shopping and helped him pick out a present for her. I don't think that he has initiated buying a present since and the price of gold has skyrocketed.

Who knew that a block of gold could have had sentimental as well as monetary value?

We should have kept it.



Enjoy your gifts,

#Slice 2013:17 of 31- Okee from Pichokee

During the month of March, I have been participating in the Slice of Life Challenge, hosted by Stacey Shubitz and Ruth Ayres at twowritingteachers.wordpress.com. Today, I am starting a new blog inspire by the fact that I've been trying to do more creative writing This post is part of a series about presents that I am working on, inspired by The Twelve Kinds of Ice by Ellen Bryan Obed. My father had a serious accident eleven years ago and I have been trying to figure out a way to write about it ever since. I'm trying to through this series of memoirs about the gifts he has given me and my family members throughout our lives.

Okee From Pichokee

When we were growing up, occasionally, we had a strange visitor knock on our front door. Okee from Pichokee was one of our favorite guests. We never knew when he would show up but as I remember now, he only visited when we had friends. I guess he was a pretty social guy.

Okee wore a bathrobe and always some kind of hat. Usually, he wore a cowboy hat although he showed up in a sombrero once and a couple of times, he wore a Saint Louis Cardinals baseball hat. My father was a big Cardinals fan so we liked that Okee wore that baseball hat. Okee always wore dark glasses that he kept on throughout his stay and sandals that revealed hairy toes. His toes were shaped like my dad's, with the same bumps and crooks.

Okee carried a guitar and he would enter the family room and help himself to a comfortable chair. Then, the entertainment would start. While I don't think that Okee was much of a guitarist, he could get the whole room singing. American Pie was one of his favorites since he had spent time in St. Louis and he loved the part about the levee. If one of our guest didn't know the words, he would pull a printed copy out of his bathrobe pocket. The writing looked like my dad's writing when he was trying to write neatly. (He usually didn't.) He also loved singing Country Roads, an old John Denver favorite, and a random Christmas carol or two. (It didn't matter what time of year it was to Okee.) Okee also told us stories. One of the favorites was about how he had wrestled a crocodile in the Mississippi River and won, then had given the crocodile skin to the Plymouth car dealer who had sold my father his Gold Duster. (The roof of my father's car had a scale like texture that fascinated all of us.)

Okee stayed until he was out of songs and stories and until we all asked him too many questions. Then, he would ask my mother for a glass of milk and a pickle and leave out the front door. He never, ever used the mudroom door that we always used, coming or going.

My father never got to meet Okee. Inevitably, he would come downstairs or arrive home moments after Okee's departure. Part of the routine involved debriefing Dad about the visit--what we sang, the stories we heard, whether Okee had asked for something other than a pickle. Our friends always went along with the routine and then shared the experiences with other friends. Everyone wanted to be at the house to experience an Okee from Pichokee visit.

Maybe Okee is still around today, wearing a different bathrobe and singing different songs, although he has been missing in our lives for many years. He is a great provider of the gift of humor, laughter, and imagination. And, if Okee ever knocks on your front door, I highly recommend letting him in!