RaisingDad

When my father was a soldier stationed in the jungles of the Philippines during the second World War, his buddy Bennett woke up one morning to discover a red bump on the inside of his upper thigh.      "Hey, Duchene," he called out, "come here for a second."      My father had already seen the interest Bennett had been showing to his crotch area, so he didn't even bother to look up from shining his boots.      "You can go into town and get yourself a Pillow Boy for that," he told him.      They decided the red bump was an insect bite of some kind.      The next day, the bump was twice as big, twice as red, and twice as painful. There was no way it could get worse.      The day after that, it got worse.       By the end of the week, Bennett couldn't take the i...

My much older and less attractive brother brought our elderly father over to my house for a visit, and then went out for a pack of cigarettes.     “I didn’t know he smoked,” I told my dad.     “He doesn’t,” my father answered.     I haven’t seen my brother since.     It didn’t happen exactly that way, but that’s the way I like to tell the story of how my father came to live with me. He’s in the later years of his life and has been widowed for some time now. He’s also been diagnosed pre-Alzheimer’s, but, really, aren’t we all pre-Alzheimer’s?     My wife, to welcome him into our home, cooked him a 5-star dinner Tom Colicchio would be jealous of, and, to top it off, she served him a nice helping of vanilla ice cream. REAL ice cream, not the cheap stuff. I save that for my mother-in-law.     Let me digress for a moment. I know some of you may have ...