RaisingDad

I was driving my father to visit an old military friend a few cities away. On our way there he decided he wanted to visit some family that lived somewhere in between, so I made a little detour to accommodate him.      It was no big deal. I know how to get there, and I know the area.      "This does not look familiar," my Dad says.      I continue to drive down the street I'm on. I say nothing. Between you and me, I'm on the right street.      Out of the corner of my eye I see him looking out up and down the street. Side to side. His head must be on a swivel.       "I don't think you're on the right street," he tells me, his eyes bugging out. "I don't recognize the area."          One funny thing about my Dad I've noticed the few times we've traveled together, his e...

Just recently, my father asked me if I would drive him out of town to visit some family he hadn't seen in a while. I told him sure, but to let me check with my wife first.      You see, my elderly father is a handful. After my mother died, in a moment of weakness I asked him if he wanted to come live with us.      "Hello? Hello?" I said into the phone I was talking to him on.      My father was already knocking at my front door with his suitcase packed.      Of course I jest.      What I didn't realize was that my father would turn out to be more work than all of my children combined. He's recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, so my wife and I have the additional sadness of watching a man who could once take apart his car and put it back together with no problem, become someone who once made my wife cry when he wondered what those little green ...

My father likes honey in his tea.      Today, out of the kindness of my heart, I went to a farmer's market and bought him some raw honey, straight from the bee hive. I even bought him a flavor I knew he liked, Orange Blossom. I didn't know honey came in different flavors, but that's neither here nor there. Well, that's not quite true. The honey's here , and my money's there .      Later that evening, as my wife is making his tea, she tells him how I drove to the farmer's market just so he could have a local honey for his tea.      "You'll like it, dad," I told him. "The guy I bought it from harvests the honey himself, and it's a lot sweeter than store bought honey." The honey contains no extra ingredients, and it's not cheap. It's also supposed to be good for your allergies. I tell him all that, and more. Except for the "it's not cheap" part.      And then I have t...

You might think I drink a lot of coffee.      That's because I do.      I don't have a lot of bad habits, but if drinking coffee's a bad habit, then that's one of them. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't do drugs. But put a cup of coffee in front of me, and I'll make it disappear like my paycheck in the hands of my ex-wife.      So, after dinner the next day, my wife serves me a cup of coffee. I sit at the table. I look at the patio. I look at my wife. She looks at my Dad and asks him, "Would you like some ice cream before we go outside?"      "Uh..." he said. He was trying to be polite.      My wife cuts him off at the pass.       "It's new ice cream," she tells him. I look up from my cup. I didn't know my wife had gone out to get any ice cream.      "What?"   ...

"This ice cream's not very good," I heard my Dad tell my wife.      Let me stop right here and formally apologize to my Mom and Dad for my ever having been a kid.  I can't begin to tell you the times my Mom served me a perfectly good meal, sometimes even perfectly delicious, and it didn't meet the standards of a kid who used to eat dirt.*  And then I had kids of my own, and, no matter what my wife cooked, they wanted to eat something else.**  So when my Dad told my wife that he didn't care for the ice cream she had just served him--and which he enthusiastically ate, judging by the speed with which he ate it--I figured he had the right not to like it.  So...      "This ice cream's not very good.  Where'd you buy it?"      "Sam's," my wife tells him.      "Sam's?"      "Yes, Sam's," she repeats herself.  Sam's is one of those Warehouse Stores, along t...

My wife's a saint.      When I first asked her if my dad could move in with us, she said, "Sure, why not?"  Her own father had passed away a few years earlier, and she had always gotten along with mine.  Besides, he was a grown man.  Self-sufficient.  He used to be in the Army, for gosh sakes.  During World War II.  How much trouble could he be?      The house we live in has a guest house in the front that is separated from our house by a nice patio.  The guest house is where my father now lives, and the patio is where I enjoy drinking coffee and reading the newspaper in the morning.  It's also where I enjoy drinking coffee and talking with my wife in the evening.      Did I mention that I enjoy drinking coffee?      That's because I do.      When I sit there, ...