I’m home for the holidays and it never ceases to amaze me all the weird quirks that my parents have. I’m not sure if it’s an everyday occurrence, or it just happens once I hit the Iowa border. As long as I live, I will never be able to figure out them out.
For instance, my mom never sleeps. Ever. And if she half-heartedly dozes, it’s always with one eye watching you. She can be snoring up until the nanosecond I try to swipe the remote away from her. “Don’t even think about changing the channel,” she’ll bark with her eyes closed. I’m assuming she sleeps after I leave to go back to KC. But when I’m here, she knows exactly what time I stumbled home from drinking wine with my friends. “You got home at 1:08 am … little late, dontchathink?”
TV viewing while I’m home is nightmarish. Dad’s TV is parked on Fox News 24/7. I tried to turn it to MSNBC once. He had the station blocked … with a parental control password. (See above paragraph.) Figures. Mom, meanwhile, watches TV nonstop. Only problem, she never watches what’s on … she flips through the remote to see what else is on. I’ve caught approximately 28 seconds of 114 different channels today. She did watch about 10 minutes of “Roots” this afternoon on BET. That’s both a record for amount of time she’s watched one show consecutively and watched BET, in general.
My dad has 14,000 different passwords to 14,000 different online accounts. Why do old people not just use something simple and effective that’s easy to remember? Nope, my dad combines the license plate number of his first car with his dentist’s dog tag number from WW1 and a misspelled version of the word Farfegnugen. I defy anyone in the CIA to crack that code. And that’s just ONE password. I had to retrieve something from his AOL account once and it was the molecular formula for six different chemicals with the birth date of his barber’s daughter’s dog groomer. It’s no wonder he’s had to open a half dozen Facebook accounts … he forgets the password.
My parents’ house remains the only place where I can truly unwind and de-stress. When I come here I usually spend the first 24 hours asleep, in my childhood bed –trying to decompress. The first couple times I did it I wondered if there was carbon monoxide poisoning in the house. Nope, turns out, I’m just catching up on months of overdue R.E.M.
My folks have, without a doubt — the crappiest wine selection ever known to man. For Xmas this year, I got them a wine of the month club just so they could appreciate something other than the $4.59 bottle of Horse Piss Chardonnay that, I assume – they found on sale at Walgreens. Had I known they were going to buy cases upon cases of Beringer’s White Zinfandel, I would have invested in stock at an early age.
As my parents get older, I’ve learned to appreciate their zest for life, their strange eccentricities and their appreciation of god-awful wine. They’ve settled in to a nice little groove in their 80’s. It’s not a rut; mind you … it’s a groove. And we should all be so lucky in our twilight years, uh, minus Fox News, of course.