What Happened To The Game?

As usual, my father is sound asleep in the family room.
     I don't know how he can sleep because, as always, he has the TV blasting away. He must have been watching a baseball game, because that's what's on. I can see it from the kitchen counter where I'm sitting. It's the 5th inning and, boy, is he missing one good game.

     Unfortunately, my Dad's snoring gets the best of me, so I leave and return just as the game is done. The players are all jumping up and down. They're congratulating each other because they won at the last second.
     And that's when my father wakes up.
     "Wow-weeeeeee," he says, looks at the TV, and then, "Hmmm... what the?"
     My father sits up a little straighter in his--my--favorite chair, so he can get a better look at the screen.
     "What's going on?" he asks no one in particular, because I know he's not talking to me.
     I answer anyway.
     "What's that, Pop?"
     "I can't understand what's going on," he tells me. "It's only the 5th inning, and I can't figure out what just happened."

     "The game's over," I break the news to him.

     "What do you mean the game's over?"
     "What do you mean, what do I mean? The game over, finished, kaput."
     "What the?" he says. "The game can't be over."
     "It's over, Pop."
     "You're wrong," he tells me. "It's only the 5th inning."

     I try to keep it simple.
     "The game just ended," I tell him. "The other team won on their last bat."

     "That can't be," he continue to argues. "It's only the 5th inning."
     I hesitate to say the following, but...
     "You fell asleep," I tell him.
     "Fell asleep?"
     "Yes, fell asleep."
     "I didn't fall asleep."
     "You fell asleep."
     "I just had something in my eye..."
     My Dad fascinates me sometimes.
     "...and I was trying to work it out."
     Why he won't just admit he fell asleep and missed the game....
     "I wasn't asleep."
     ...is beyond me.
     "Hmmm..." Smack, smack, SMACK! "Ahhh..." Click! "I just closed my eyes for a couple of seconds..." he says, and moves his head in closer to me so I can get a good look, "...you see, I had something in it and I was just trying to get it out."
     He puts a forefinger under his eye and pulls down. Not a sight I particularly want to see.
     "See that? Now, how could the game have ended in the few seconds it took for me to clear my eye?"
     He keeps trying to show me the inside of his lower eyelid.
     I keep trying to ignore it.
     "Blah, blah, blah," he corrects.
     "Wah, wah, wah," he complains.
     "Not asleep... game over... 5th inning..." he repeats.

     Well, I've been told that I shouldn't really tell him when he falls asleep, because he gets mad at the unwanted information and takes it out on everybody, but it is what it is.

     "Well, Pop," I say, finally, "all I can tell you is the game is over."

     "It can't be over," my Dad denies.
     "This game better not be over if it knows what's good for it." he threatens, angrily.
     "I'd give my first-born son..." (me) "...for it not to be over," he bargains with the devil.
     "Why, oh why, does it have to be over?" he cries as he settles into a deep depression.
     "Well, I'll be... it's over," he finally accepts...
     ...and falls back to sleep.

 
 

Raising My Father

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@JimDuchene

 

One Way Or The Other

Recently, my wife wanted me to go shopping with her.
     At first, I didn't want to. I like to hike in the afternoon, and her shopping schedule would disrupt my walking schedule.
     Finally, when she told me we'd be going to the mall, I agreed. I figured that the way my wife shops, I would still get my walking done, and this way both of us would be a winner.
     In my case, a broke winner.
     Unfortunately, my elderly father who lives with us decided he wanted to come along, so, instead of walking, I knew I'd end up being a babysitter for a 96-year-old man. He used to walk every morning, but, recently, his idea of going on a walk has become sitting in front of the TV and watching The Price Is Right.
     After a store or two, my father and I sat and waited for my wife to run out of money. As we watched the other Saturday shoppers walk past, a group of very sexily dressed girls walked by.
     "Hmmm..." I said.
     "Hmmm..." my father replied, and then he told me, "Seeing those girls makes me wish I was 20 years older."
     "Older?" I asked him. "Don't you mean 20 years younger?"
     "Nah," he said. "I mean 20 years older. That way I wouldn't care one way or the other."
 
 

Raising My Father

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@JimDuchene
as featured in Desert Exposure Magazine

 

Nice Job, Columbo

Our dogs are pretty good about going outside to do their business . If they have an accident it's usually our fault because we either had the back door closed or we didn't pay attention to them when they tried to warn us.

     Today, my father's dog must not have been feeling well, because he had an accident. Twice! It's probably from all the junk food my father insists on feeding him, but my father will never admit to it. Either that, or my Dad has trained him to annoy me.

     When the second accident happened, my father was sitting in his usual spot in the great room, minding his own business, and snacking on a chicken leg. He wanted to know what was going on when he saw my wife and I cleaning up the mess.

     "What happened?" he asked.

     "Well," I tell him, "your dog just had an accident in the house."

     "My dog, you say?"

     "Yes, your dog."

     "Hmm, it couldn't have been my dog."

     "Why not?"

     "My dog's housebroken."

     I could see my wife pursing her lips.

     "It was your dog, Dad."

     "Maybe it was your dog," he told me.

     Now, I have a big dog. I mean, a big dog. And he's never had an accident in the house. If he ever had had an accident in the house, I would have to call the President.

     My father's dog, on the other hand, is of the small, yappy variety. I find small, yappy dogs particularly useless. Well, that's not true. I just find my Dad's small, yappy dog useless. Well, more annoying than useless. And more irritating than annoying. Sometimes he'll pee in the house out of spite. If he had an accident in the house, the "gift" he left for us would have been small, which is exactly the size of what we found.

     "Yeah, it was your dog, Dad," I tell him.

     "Well..." he says, "you know.... You say my dog?" His words turn into a mumble as he shakes his head in disbelief. "Mumble, mumble."

     "Yes, Dad," my wife tells him, as she uses some little sanitary wipes to sanitize the marked territory. "Your dog must not be feeling well. He didn't make it out the back door in time."

     "Or even try," I get the feeling she wanted to say.

     My wife usually has all the patience of a saint, and she did the first time the little stinker had his accident. Apparently, she lost some of the sparkle on her halo the second time around.

     My father gets up and walks over, looking at her with his bug eyes as she was finishing up. There are only two times my father's eyes bug out. One, when he's guilty of something, and two, when trying to get away with something.

     He looks over the crime scene. At any minute I'm expecting his black friend who flies a helicopter to show up from Hawaii and help him solve the case.

     "Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh," he says, evaluating the evidence. Then he points at the area of violation with what's left of his chicken leg, and, chewing, he tells her, "Well, you know, your grandson was here earlier."

     "Yeah, so?" I say.

     I was irritated to begin with, and the way he said that irritated me even more. He said "your grandson" like it had nothing to do with him. My grandson is his great-grandson. And it's true, we took care of our grandson for a few hours earlier that morning, but, like I said, "So what?"

     "He was standing at that very spot," my Dad says, pointing again with the chicken leg. Insinuating that my grandson (his great-grandson), who's waay beyond his potty training years, must have been the perpetrator. Assault with a stinky weapon.

     "Yeah, right, Columbo," I wanted to say. "Maybe it was you!"

 

 

Raising My Father

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@JimDuchene

 

Maloney's Other Predicament

I told you that last story to set myself up for this story.
     I was talking with my buddy Maloney, when I mentioned that my father had recently been having trouble "dropping the kids off at the pool," if you get my drift. We've tried increasing the fiber in his diet, but the problem with that is it will just sit there on his plate until it sprouts legs and walks off on its own. We've also tried an over-the-counter laxative, but that hasn't worked, either.
     I could swear that my father's digestive system is perfectly fine, and he's just pretending to be constipated to get attention, but who would believe me? My wife certainly doesn't.
     "I believe you," my friend Maloney told me.
     "You do?" I asked him.
     This came to me as somewhat of a shock. What Maloney does best is turn every conversation about someone else into a conversation about himself, so his short, three-word belief in me caught me by surprise.
     "Of course I do," Maloney confirmed. "The same thing happened to my mother-in-law back when she used to live with us."
     See what I mean?
     "It got so bad," Maloney went on, "that we had to take her to the doctor. Apparently, her wallet was constipated too, because we ended up having to pay for the visit. We always had to pay for everything with her. In fact..."
     "So what happened?" I asked before my friend went off in a different direction, which he has a tendency to do.
     "Well, the doctor prescribed a laxative for her. We paid for that, too."
     The last thing I wanted to hear about was the bathroom problems of Maloney's elderly mother-in-law, but there was something oddly compelling in his story.
     "This was the only time I've ever felt sorry for her," Maloney continued. "My wife helps her with her medicine, and so she gave her one pill."
     "One pill?" I asked. A single pill didn't sound like much.
     "One pill," Maloney confirmed. "The directions said for her to take only one pill before bedtime, and that's exactly what Gail gave her. The mistake my wife made was she left the bottle of pills with her mother. Her mother must have figured, 'If one pill is good, then two must be better.' So she took three! Gail knows this, because she counted all the pills that were left in the bottle. Well, let's just say the pills worked too well. Sometime during the night, they did their magic, and, when she woke up, it was like that horse's head scene in The Godfather. You know the scene. That movie producer doesn't want to give a movie role to Don Corleone's godson, so Don Corleone sends Tom Hagen to Hollywood to take care of the problem. Man, what a great movie..."
     "You were telling me about your mother-in-law," I reminded my friend.
     "I was?" Maloney asked, and then thought about it.
     "I was," he finally concluded.
     "My point is," he said, making his way back to his point, "the next morning after meeting with Tom Hagen, the movie producer wakes up and finds a horse's head in his bed. there's blood everywhere. It's a message from the Godfather. 'I can get to you at any time," was Don Corleone's message, so the movie producer gives Johnny Fontaine the movie role. In the book he gets an Oscar."
     "The movie producer?"
     "Johnny Fontaine, for Best Actor."
     "And your mother-in-law?"
     "What about my mother-in-law?"
     "Did she wake up with a horse's head in her bed?"
     "I wish she woke up with a horse's head in her bed. No, what happened was she woke up in a bed full of shit."
     "She did?"
     "Damn skippy," Maloney assured me. "She probably woke up thinking, 'What the fudge? It stinks in here. Is my daughter cooking breakfast again?' Then, like that movie producer, she must have reached under the blankets, drew her hand back, and... and... well, let's just say it wasn't horse's blood that her hand would have been covered with. The first thing she probably thought was, 'I wonder what my son-in-law was up to last night?'"

     I thought about Maloney's mother-in-law, and then I thought about my own elderly father.
     Do I want to live to be 96?
     Heck no.
     But what choice do I have?

     My wife has a stronger stomach than I do, most women do. Men are weak. If my father ever left us a surprise present in his bed for us, I would just take all the sheets, all the blankets, and everything else and throw them into our neighbor's trashcan and be done with it. My wife, on the other hand, would have probably laundered everything.
     Which is what Maloney's wife, Gail, did. Maloney said she washed them and then she washed them again. She added Clorox, Pine Sol, and probably even their dog's flea and tick shampoo. When she was done, she washed them again.
     "The look on my mother-in-law's face was heart-breaking," Maloney told me, shaking his head sadly. "A look of shame and defeat. I felt for her. She kept asking Gail if she could help, but Gail told her not to worry, she had it under control. If my mother-in-law had asked me, I would have answered, "Sure you can help... QUIT SHITTING IN BED!"
     "So what did your wife tell you?"
     "Nothing. What could she say?"
     "What did you tell your wife?"
     Knowing Maloney, he had to have told her something.
     "I was sympathetic," he said. "I told her, 'Honey... don't you ever put those sheets on our bed."
 
 

Raising My Father

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jimduchene.blogspot.com  American Chimpanzee

@JimDuchene