When they took me to the store, I was always asking them to buy me something. Spiderman comic books. The Man From UNCLE camera that turned into a gun.
And candy.
I was always asking for candy.
"You'll ruin your teeth!" my mother would warn me.
I'd think to myself, "If I can't have candy, what's the point of having good teeth?"
This was before I discovered girls, and how they had the annoying habit of preferring guys with good dental hygiene.
I remember one Christmas, when I was about ten-years-old, I pestered my parents for a chemistry set that was probably more expensive than they could afford, but, on Christmas morning... there it was.
Did I play with it?
Not even once.
Cut to the present. My mother's been dead for a few years now, my father lives with me and my family, and we're at Costco. Costco is a large warehouse store along the lines of a Sam's or a Price Club, where you don't just buy one thing, you buy a lot of one thing.
My father usually goes with my wife, and they usually come back with a lot of something we don't need. Courtesy of my father. One time he wanted a box containing 48 corn dogs, and my wife bought it for him. She always does.
He ate one.
The rest have taken up space in our freezer ever since.
This time I go with them. He wanders around close by. He picks up a pack of white tube socks. Inspects them. Looks at me. Puts them back. In another aisle he looks at the Rogaine. My father's hair has thinned a bit, but he doesn't need it. He looks over at me. Back at the Rogaine. And then puts it back.
Same with the gourmet cheese.
We're at the frozen foods section. He finds something he likes. A box of 120 little frozen cream puff balls. Enough for a small wedding. A small wedding that I'd be paying for. He looks up. Sees me. Looks around for my wife. She's not there. She's at the far end of the aisle.
There's only me.
"These are really good," he tells me in a just-making-conversation kind of way. He's never eaten one before in his life. "I wonder how much they are."
My father looks at the box. Turns it around in his hands. Reads the back.
"It's all natural," he says.
He looks down the aisle, where he sees my wife turning the corner, moving away from us. She's the one he usually asks when he wants something. Let me take that back, he doesn't ask. He just drops whatever item that catches his fancy into our grocery cart for my wife to pay for.
My father stands there looking at the box of cream puffs in his hands.
There's a long pause. Finally...
"Son," he says, "do you think I can have this?"
Imagine that.
A father having to ask his son for something at the grocery store. My father has never asked me for anything before in his life. I think about the chemistry set he bought me that I never used.
"Sure, dad," I tell him. "Put them in the cart."
Now what am I going to do with 120 cream puffs?
Raising My Father
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