About Your Parents Thread

I'm going to hell.
My first thought when I read the line "blew himself up by smoking" was this...

 

When I was maybe nine years old, my friends and I waded into a nearby farmer's field and knocked down some corn to make a fort. The farmer found the fort and drove around our subdivision, door-to-door, trying to find out who did it. I cracked. None of my friends did. At the time (1982 or so), I made $2 a week for my allowance. My dad told me for ten weeks I had to get on my bike and take my allowance to the farmer. $20. That was a fortune to me.

Maybe two or three weeks into my ritual, the farmer's German shepherd bit me on the leg and took me off my bike. I figured the farmer or my dad would forgive my debt. Neither did. Instead I had to save my allowance for the six or seven weeks left in my sentence, and then my dad drove me to the farm to watch me hand over my little bundle of money to the farmer.

I thought it was the most unfair thing at the time, and writing it out, it almost seems cruel. But I think more than just about any childhood experience, that made me who I am: extremely wary of farmers.

 

$2 a week allowance? You should've been a paperboy.

 

This is an excellent thread. I regret not finding it sooner, as my various ups and downs are quite mundane in comparison.

I am a band geek born to band geeks. My folks met during the summer of 1976 in a group called the United States Collegiate Wind Band. There were two members from each state. Dad was a tuba player from Upper Michigan and Mom a trumpet player from Maine. They toured all the pretty parts of Europe (ironically, on the trip, much of the group got food poisoning from a dish that, save for a slight spelling change, is also my last name), stayed in touch, and eventually Mom came to Michigan, they got married (in Maine with an accidental flyover from the Blue Angels, performing at the local Naval Air Station) and here I am.

They came from different parts of the country and their backgrounds were pretty divergent as well. Dad's side of the family is close-knit (five kids and spouses, no marital strife or substance issues whatsoever) and tremendously musical. There were enough of us, mostly brass, that five or six relatives (from three generations) march with the local city band on the 4th of July. Several more would bring instruments for an impromptu patriotic concert on the boathouse at the lake later in the day. At one point, three of the five kids were music teachers (and a fourth was an art teacher). Dad has a 'Dad bod,' makes 'Dad jokes,' coached my Little League teams, deaned church camp every year. It's almost too good. I often fear that I'll never reach my potential in this business because I don't have the 'asshole gene' necessary to be really good, and Dad is why, because he doesn't have it either. He went into school administration, but was turned down repeatedly by the school district we lived in because he was perceived to be too "nice." So nice, in fact, that the district he worked for 15 years ran him out on a rail for no good reason. That said, he found a job running senior citizen programs in town (commute down from 30 miles to half a block) and is finding his second wind. 59th birthday was this week.

Mom had it different. Her dad was severely epileptic and died before she hit her teens, which led to her mom having a nervous breakdown and a brief stint in foster care. Regardless, she and her two siblings were raised on welfare, the main impact of that on me being that she's relentlessly cheap (though also quite thrifty). One of them served in the Air Force and got a degree from Columbia, the other has mostly scratched out a living in the lower middle class. Nana has spent a large part of her life trying to "fix" the people around her, which has led to Mom spending a large amount of time (roughly 15 years now), trying to "fix" me, whether it was relentless concern-trolling about my weight, my cleaning abilities or my propensity to bite my nails. It has reached the shouting match level at times. And yet, physically, we're very similar. Same blood type, same poor eyesight, and same tendency toward mood swings.

It's not perfect, but it's not bad.

 

My mum is sitting beside me on the couch, doing her crossword. I am reminded of when I had my first published story, and I showed it to her, super proud, and she took out her red pen and circled three grammatical errors. Sometimes, the older you get, you realize that all the times you thought you were making choices, you really had no choice at all.

 

My mom started a scrapbook with the first stories I had published at age 13, each one with the 49 cents or whatever I made for it.

Wish I still had that.

And I wish I'd gotten into the habit of calling my Dad, the old Air Force liutenant colonel, "Sir" when I had the chance. He would have appreciated that.

 

Twenty five years later this story would have featured multiple lawsuits.

 

My 84-year-old mom still does crossword puzzles daily.

 

My old man had it all going on: Glasgow street thug, degenerate gambler, raging boozer, prescription drug addict, two lighter a day smoker...he died 25 years ago last month and we're all in a better place because of it

 

Was visiting one time and had scribbled a few verses in a notebook and left it on the living room table overnight. Next day I sit down and see my mom had added a verse. Thought that was pretty cool.

 

It was on par.