RaisingDad

"What are you doing, son?"      My elderly father saw me being distracted by my phone and took his eyes off the baseball game we were both watching to ask me about it.      "I'm just fiddling with a phone ap, dad," I explained.      "Oh... a phone ap," my dad said, nodding his head. "Whatever that is."      I decided to ignore that.      "It's pretty cool,"  I told him. "If I want to know what the weather is like, I can just look at the ap and it will tell me."      "In my day," my dad said, turning back to the TV, "we just looked outside."     Raising My Father RaisingMyFather.BlogSpot.com JimDuchene.BlogSpot.com   American Chimpanzee @JimDuchene  

I've come across a rare brandy called Pierre Duchene only twice in my life.      The first time was when my aunt came back from a vacation and generously brought my father--her brother--a bottle.      Sadly, that bottle was broken. The story of how it was broken depends on whether you heard my father's version of the events or my mother's.      Back when she was still alive, that is.      The next time I came across a bottle of that particular brandy was years later when my much older and less attractive brother found it when he, in an interesting coincidence, was also on vacation. Like our aunt, he, too, was generous enough to bring back a bottle for each of his siblings, as well as replacing our parent's broken one.      Between you and I, it was probably his wife who actually bought the brandy, and the most my brother did was take credit for it.      But you didn't hear that from me. ...

Many years ago, back when my lovely mother was still alive and my beautiful wife and I still considered ourselves newlyweds, we took both of our parents to a Chinese restaurant to give them the happy news that we were expecting our first baby.      My wife and I were both nervous about surprising them with the revelation that they were about to become grandparents, so we made it all the way to the end of the meal without spilling the beans.      The check came on a little black plastic tray that also held a fortune cookie for each of us. My father and father-in-law immediately began bickering over who would pay for the meal.      "Hmm," I thought to myself, "I should invite them out to dinner more often."      Grabbing one of the fortune cookies, I broke it open.      Inside, my fortune read:   What you do in private...

I'm not cheap.      I'm frugal.      It's a condition I got from my father.      When we--my wife and I--invited him to move in and spend the rest of his elderly life with us, I thought the most it would cost me would be a tank of gas, the gas it would take to move his stuff from his place to ours.      My wife had other ideas.      All of his old furniture was fine when it was in his house, but in our house it was obvious he needed an upgrade. Why, his mattress alone seemed to date back to prehistoric times. I think he originally got it by hitting a caveman over the head with a rock.      My wife thought the least we could do for him was buy him a new bedroom set.      "It'll make him feel more at home," she explained.      I thought about that.      "Maybe, on our way to the...