Baby, It's Cold Inside

If you read the last story, maybe you saw the same pattern that I did.

     When a person is a baby, they ask you "Why?" all the time, and when a person gets elderly, they ask you "What?" all the time.

     Most times, I'm sure it's because they can't hear. Other times, I'm sure it's because they just plain don't want to hear. If he's learned anything watching Law & Order, it's that you can't be held accountable in a court of law to what you haven't been a party to.
     As I write these words, my father is sitting in the great room. I know the weather in other parts of the country is very severe with cold fronts if you're lucky and snow storms if you're not. That's why I live where I do, Here, the weather has been nice. It's not even cool, it's actually warm.

     Don't hate me because my weather is beautiful.

     From where I sit, I can hear my father complain.

     "It's cold," he says to no one in particular.

     Since he doesn't direct his comments to me, I ignore him.  It's not because I'm a jerk, although I know it can be construed that way. I've just been through that conversation a thousand times before.

     "It's cold," he's said.

     "Why don't you put on something warmer?" I've said back.

     "What?"

     "Why don't you put on something warmer?"

     "Something what?"

     "Something warmer."
     "What's warmer?"
     "No, why don't you put on something warmer?"

     "What?"

     So forgive me if I don't volunteer to be frustrated.

     The funny thing is, when my wife and I don't want my father to hear something, that's when he gets the kind of super hearing even a Shaolin monk would be jealous of.

     In the old 70s TV show Kung Fu, a blind kung fu master asked the boy version of David Carradine's Kwai Chang Cain, "Do you hear the grasshopper by your feet?"

     The young apprentice didn't, but my father could have if that grasshopper had been whispering something it didn't want my father to overhear.

     "Whisper, whisper, whisper," the grasshopper might whisper to his grasshopper wife, "and that's where I hid our grandson's Christmas present."

     "Are you sure you hid it far enough in the back of the top shelf of the closet?" my father would want to know.

     "You weren't supposed to hear that," the grasshopper would tell him, throwing up its grasshopper arms in exasperation.

     "What?"
     That's when the grasshopper might want to go out for a pack of cigarettes and do what Bruce Springstein's does at the beginning of his song Hungry Heart. With a hungry heart, he sings...

     "It's cold in here," my Dad says, rubbing his arms, bringing me back to the present.

     I watch him from the corner of my eyes as he complains. I look around the house. The doors are closed, the windows are closed, the fans are off, and, shoot, to tell you the truth, I'm hot..

     "Mumble, mumble, mumble cold."

     I feel like telling him,"You wouldn't be cold if you would just put on some warmer clothes, old man."

     My father is wearing his usual winter outfit: a thin t-shirt, shorts to show off his skinny legs, and sandals. Shoot, I'd be cold if I was wearing that get-up, even if I was wearing it in 85-degree weather.

     My wife looks at me, and I look at my wife.

     "I've bought him all kinds of warm clothes," she's told me before and is telling me now. "His closet is full of warm clothes."
     "What?" my father says.
     "It's cold," my wife humors him.
     "You bet it is."
     To me, she mouths the word, "Packed."

     It's true. My father has sweat shirts, sweat pants, heavy-duty 32-degree long-sleeve pullovers, light-weight jackets, and thermal tops and bottoms. He has Under Armour shirts made with a space-age material available only on Matt Damon's Mars. He has the same kind of clothes that were worn by Bob Hall the final time he summited Mount Everest (He died on the way down, but we only tell my father about the first part.). On and on. And on. Plus, my father has an electric blanket he refuses to use on the armrest of his--my--favorite chair.

     "Man, it's cold," my father says again.

     I shake my head. My Dad is cold because, like a stubborn baby, he chooses to be cold. The older a baby gets, the less cute its antics become. Nothing more annoying than a 96-year-old baby. Unless it's me, when I'm 96-years-old. I bet you I'll still be pretty darn cute.

     My wife has a sixth sense about things. She knows I'm about to open my big, fat mouth and say something I'll probably regret later, so she gives me The Look. Then she gives me a double-shot of The Look, just in case I didn't get it the first time.

     She's right.
     It's better that I don't say anything.
     Because if I did say something... I probably would regret it later.

 

 

Raising My Father

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