RaisingDad

When my family and I asked my elderly widowed father to come live with us we decided it was probably best to buy a house with a separate in-law apartment for him to live in. It would give him his privacy, we thought.      He lived there for a while, but then moved into the main house with us, so I'll never see that money back.      Selling our old house to buy this current one was a headache, though. This all happened when the housing bubble burst, you see. We were so desperate to sell that we eventually began holding open houses ourselves to try to drum up some business.      "Why didn't you just stay where you were at?" I can hear you asking.      Well, the reason is we started the process just before the housing bubble burst, and were tens of thousands into the process when the economy fell apart.      On one such open house, my wife and I had to leave, so we were going to scrap it for that...

Don't ask me how it happened, but when our washing machine broke I was the one who got stuck making the boring, time-wasting trip to the friendly neighborhood laundromat. Who knew that when I volunteered for the task, my wife would take me up on it?      "You can always stay at home and watch your dad," my wife told me when I grumbled.      Hmm... two or three hours of taking care of my father versus two or three hours in the quiet humidity of a Laundromat?      I chose the laundromat.      To tell you the truth, I didn't even know there were such things as laundromats anymore. I thought they went the way of the dodo, the phone booth... my youth. I figured I'd probably have to drive to the Democratic voter part of town to find one, but, no, there was actually one in the strip mall closest to our house. How had I never seen it before?      You live, you learn.      So, with an armful of dirty ...

If you’ve read the Raising My Father stories over at the Desert Diary section of Desert Exposure magazine, you know that my much older and less attractive brother takes care of our elderly father. He does this without complaint. At least I think he does it without complaint. I quit listening to him years ago.     There are times, however, when my brother and his family travel out of town on vacation and are unable to take him along. This is when I’ve had the pleasure of taking care of my father. Let me stress that it is indeed a pleasure, because, if my brother happens to read this, I want him to think he got the better end of the taking-care-of-your-aging- parent deal.     It was during these adventures that I came to the conclusion that my father should be a private investigator, and I'm not just saying that because he sports a bushy mustache, drives a red Ferrari, and has an old war buddy who flies a helicopter for a living. No...