Acorns and toilet paper don't fall far from the tree!
Following my first post, I received and email from an old (make that childhood) friend suggesting that I should post something about how we grow up to become our parents. This phenomenon is, as she put it, scary. I couldn't agree more. To save my friend from any embarassment for having communicated an idea to a known psychopath such as myself, I will call her simply, C.B. (Although, her real name is Cindy Bernardo).
Anyway, I couldn't agree with her more. Let's start with food. I remember watching my father relish a breakfast concoction that looked to me to have originally been intended for patching holes in drywall. It was something called "sausage gravy" and I remember watching him eat it like someone might watch a person downing bugs, worms or some other equally disgusting substance. Both parents enjoyed my obvious discomfort by suggesting repeatedly that I "try some". In today's world this is probably tantamount to child abuse, and I swore that I would never, in a million years, even if subjected to oriental bamboo shoot fingernail torture, taste that disgusting mass of flour, water, sausage grease and Lord knows what else. Yeecchhh.
Well now, I can't get enough of the stuff. I tinker with the spices and when I eat it, you would think I was partaking of the nectar of the gods. I remember a similar reaction from my kids as the one I had as a child. Dustin can appreciate this because he has since started to take to it as well. Melanie is safe, as she is a vegetarian. Anyway, this is another warning particularly to Dustin. If you want to be like me, and have your cholesterol measured in the thousands, keep it up.
Another measure of this tendency to become our parents is demonstrated by our relationship with inanimate objects. I remember my dad spending hours of futile toil trying to make various mechanical devices in our house perform the function for which they were manufactured. Invariably, any labor saving appliance we purchased, if it were new, would do what it was supposed to for approximately one week. At which point it functioned at about 1/4 of its intended capacity (about the same as a congressman) or ceased to operate altogether (about the same as Bush). If it were second hand, as was the case with most of our purchases, it did what it was supposed to, until it hit our residence. Then it just died.
My dad, either out of an abundance of thriftiness, or gluttony for punishment would procede to do what he liked to call "tinker". Trying this and that to get this contraption to work as it was supposed to. Frankly, it never happened, and the device which held such high hopes at the time of purchase operated at half capacity, worked once in awhile (no one knew when or why this would happen, but it did) or it just became another useless pile of debris that eventually found its way to the curb for the Monday morning trash pickups. I think my siblings will back me up on this, but we had many appliances around our house that came in with a power cord and by the time my dad was done "tinkering" it had more things attached to it than an octopus.
This knack for being at war with all things mechanical, has of course been inherited by me. One of my biggest regrets in life, is the fact that I never learned to just call a repairman when something went on the fritz, rather than attempt to fix it, teach my children a whole new language (which, of course can't be repeated in mixed company) and make things infinitely worse. My current biggest nemesis is, of course, my computer. I know rationally that it is just a pile of parts that should consistently perform mechanical computing functions without ill will or malice toward it's owner. Don't make me laugh, this thing has a malevolent soul that makes satan seem like Mr. Rogers.
All of this gets me, finally, to where I was going with this. After my father died we cleaned out his house. It seems that in later years he became obsessed with toilet paper. We found packages of it everywhere. He had either become convinced that it would become the next "gold" or that in a nuclear holocaust we would all have to revert to what the used in the hills when he was growing up. It was then that I knew the real reason my dad left Appalachia. It wasn't for economic gain, or big city life. He moved north on a quest for Charmin. This is perhaps the scariest part of this whole phenomenon. Not only do I now fear that I will someday become a TP hoarder, but that it will somehow have been irrevocably passed genetically to my offspring. Kids, I'm sorry, but I didn't mean to do it.
If anyone has any comments on this topic, you should be able to post them using the link at the bottom of the page.
I think I'll end now, all of a sudden I have to go to the bathroom.
Love,
Dad
posted by Bob @ 5:06 PM
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